What he did was to eat his scallops a la King with appetite, fraternize cheerfully with Lucille’s friend, whose name was Tommy Burke, and who was an old acquaintance of his, speak to Marjorie occasionally in the most natural way in the world, and altogether behave entirely as if it really was his party, and he was very glad that there was a party. It is to be said that he ignored Logan rather more than politeness demanded. But Logan was so used to being petted that he never knew it. Marjorie did, and lavished more attention on him defiantly to try to make up for it. She thought that the evening never would end.

After the food was finished it was to be expected that Lucille would go to the piano, and play some more, and that the men would sit about smoking on the davenport and the taborets, and that every one would be pleasantly quiet. But Lucille did not. Instead, she and Francis retired to the back room, leaving Marjorie and the others to amuse each other, and talk for what seemed to Marjorie’s strained nerves an eternity of time. It was Francis who had called Lucille, moreover, and not Lucille who had summoned Francis, as could have been expected.

Finally the other men rose to go. Francis came out of the inner room and went with them. Before he went he stopped to say to Marjorie:

“I told you I wanted to talk things over with you. I’ll be back in a half-hour. You seem to be so popular that the only way to see you alone is to get you in a motor-car, so if you aren’t too tired to drive around with me to-night, to a place where I have to go, I’ll bring you home safely. . . . I didn’t mean to speak so sharply to you, Marjorie, over the telephone. Please forgive me.”

“Certainly,” said Marjorie coldly and tremulously. It could be seen that she did not forgive him in the least.

He went downstairs with the others, laughing with Burke, who had a dozen army reminiscences to exchange with him, and bidding as small a good-by as decency permitted to Logan. Marjorie heard him dash up again, and then run down, as if he had left something outside the door and forgotten it. Lucille came over to her and began to fuss at her about changing her frock for a heavier one, and taking enough wraps.

“Why, it’s only a short drive,” Marjorie expostulated. “And I’m not sure that I want to go, anyway. I don’t think there’s anything more to be said than we have said.”

Francis, with that disconcerting swiftness which he possessed, had come back as she spoke.

He came close to her, and spoke softly.

“You used to like the boy you married, Marjorie. For his sake won’t you do this one thing? Give me a hearing one more hearing.”

Lucille had come back again with a big loose coat, and she was wrapping it round her friend with a finality that meant more struggle than poor tired Marjorie was capable of making. After all, another half-hour of discussion would not matter. The end would be the same. She went down with them to the big car that stood outside, and even managed to say something flippant about its looking like a traveling house, it was so big. Francis established her in the front seat, by him, tucked a rug around her, for the night was sharp for May, and drove to Fifth Avenue, then uptown.

She waited, wearily and immovable, for him to argue with her further, but he seemed in no hurry to commence. They merely drove on and on, and Marjorie was content not to talk. It was a clear, beautiful night, too late for much traffic, so they went swiftly. The ride was pleasant. All that she had been through had tired her so that she found the silence and motion very pleasant and soothing.

Finally he turned to her, and she braced herself for whatever he might want to say.

“Would you mind if we drove across the river for a little while?” he asked.

“Why no,” she said idly. “Out in the country, you mean?”

He assented, and they drove on, but not to the ferry. They turned, and went up Broadway, far, far again.

“Where are we?” asked Marjorie finally. “Isn’t it time you turned around and took me back? And didn’t you have something you wanted to say to me?”

“Yes ” he said absently. “No, we have all the time in the world. There’s no scandal possible in being out motoring with your husband, even if you shouldn’t get home till daylight.”

“But where are we?” demanded Marjorie again.

“The Albany Post Road,” said Francis. This meant very little to Marjorie, but she waited another ten minutes before she asked again.

“Just the same post road as before,” said Francis preoccupiedly, letting the machine out till they were going at some unbelievable speed an hour. “The Albany. Not the Boston.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter to me what post road,” remonstrated Marjorie, beginning rather against her will to laugh a little, as she had been used to do with Francis. “I want to go home.”

“You are,” said he.

“Oh, is this one of those roads that turns around and swallows its own tail?” she demanded, “and brings you back where you started?”

“Just where you started,” he assented, still in the same preoccupied voice.

She accepted this quietly for the moment.

“Francis,” she said presently, “I mean it. I want to go home.”

“You are going home,” said Francis. “But not just yet.”

It seemed undignified to row further. She was so tired so very tired!

Francis did not speak again, and after a little while she must have dropped off to sleep; for when she came to herself again the road was a different one. They were traveling along between rows of pines, and the road stretched ahead of them, empty and country-looking. She turned and asked sleepily, “What time is it, Francis, please?”

He bent a little as he shot his wrist-watch forward enough to look at the phosphorescent dial.

“Twenty minutes past three,” he said as if it was the most commonplace hour in the world to be driving through a country road.

For a moment she did not take it in. Then she threw dignity to the winds. She was rested enough to have some fight in her again.

“I’m going home! I’m going home if I have to walk!” she said wildly. She started to spring up in the car, with some half-formed intention of forcing him to stop by jumping out.

“Now, Marjorie, don’t act like a movie-heroine,” he said commonplacely and infuriatingly. He also took one hand off the steering-wheel and put it around her wrist. “You can’t go back to New York unless I take you. We’re fifty miles up New York State, and there isn’t a town near at all.”

Marjorie sat still and looked at him. The car went on.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “You can’t be going to abduct me, Francis?”

Francis, set as his face was, smiled a little at this.

“That isn’t the word, because you don’t abduct your lawful wife. But I do want you to try me out before you discard me entirely. And apparently this is the only way to get you to do it.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Want the cards on the table?”

She nodded.

“All the cards now? Or would you rather take things as they come?”

All this time the car was going ahead full speed in the moonlight.

“Everything now!” she said tensely.

He never looked at her as he talked. His eyes were on the road ahead.

“Just now as soon as we get to a spot where it seems likely to be comfortable, we’re going to unship a couple of pup-tents from the back of the car, and sleep out here. I have all your things in the back of the car. If you’d rather, you can sleep in the car; you’re little and I think you could be comfortable on the back seat.”

She interrupted him with a cry of injury.

“My things? Where did you get them?”

“Lucille packed them. She worked like a demon to get everything ready. She was thrilled.”

“Thrilled!” said Marjorie resentfully. “I’m so sick of people being thrilled I don’t know what to do. I’m not thrilled. . . . I might have known it. It’s just the sort of thing Lucille would be crazy over doing. I suppose she feels as if she were in the middle of a melodrama.”

“I’m sorry, Marjorie, but there’s something about you that always makes people feel romantic. . . .” His voice softened. “I remember the first time I saw you, coming into that restaurant a little behind Lucille, it made me feel as if the fairy-stories I’d stopped believing in had come true all over again. You were so little and so graceful, and you looked as if you believed in so many wonderful things ”

“Stop!” said Marjorie desperately. “It isn’t fair to talk that way to me. I won’t have it. If you feel that way you ought to take me back home.”

“On the contrary, just the reverse,” quoted Francis, who seemed to be getting cooler as Marjorie grew more excited. “You said you’d listen. Be a sport, and do listen.”

“Very well,” said Marjorie sulkily. She was a sport by nature, and she was curious.

“I’ve taken a job in Canada reforesting of burned-over areas. I had to go to-night at the latest. It seemed to me that we hadn’t either of us given this thing a fair try-out. I hadn’t a chance with you unless I took this one. My idea is for you to give me a trial, under any conditions you like that include our staying in the same house a couple of months. I’m crazy over you. I want to stay married to you the worst way. You’re all frightened of me, and marriage, and everything, now. But it’s just possible that you may be making a mistake, not seeing it through. It’s just possible that I may be making a mistake, thinking that you and I would be happy.”

Marjorie gave a little tense jerk of outraged pride at this rather tactless speech. It sounded too much as if Francis might possibly tire of her which it wasn’t his place to do.

“And so,” Francis went on doggedly, “my proposition is that you go up to Canada with me. There’s a fairly decent house that goes with the job. There won’t be too much of my society. You need a rest anyhow. I won’t hurry you, or do anything unfair. Only let us try it out, and see if we wouldn’t like being married, exactly as if we’d had a chance to be engaged before.”

“And if we don’t?” inquired Marjorie.

“And if we don’t, I’ll give you the best divorce procurable this side of the water.”

“You sound as if it was a Christmas present,” said Marjorie.

She thought she was temporizing, but Francis accepted it as willingness to do as he suggested.

“Then you will?” he asked.

“But it’s such an awful step to take!”

Francis leaned back she could feel him do it, in the dark and began to argue as coolly as if it were not three o’clock in the morning, on an unfrequented road.

“The most of the step is taken. You haven’t anything to do but just go on as you are no packing or walking or letter-writing or anything of the sort. Simply stay here in the car with me and end at the place in Canada, live there and let me be around more or less. If there’s anything you want at home that Lucille has forgotten ”

“Knowing Lucille, there probably is,” said Marjorie.

“ we’ll write her and get it. . . . Well?”

Marjorie took a long breath, tried to be very wide-awake and firm, and fell silent, thinking.

She was committed, for one thing. People would think it was all right and natural if she went on with Francis, and be shocked and upset and everything else if she didn’t. Cousin Anna Stevenson would write her long letters about her Christian duty, and the office would be uncomfortable. And Lucille well, Lucille was a blessed comfort. She didn’t mind what you did so long as it didn’t put her out personally. She at least but Lucille had packed the bag! And you couldn’t go and fling yourself on the neck of as perfidious a person as that.

And it would be an adventure. Francis was nice, or at least she remembered it so; a delightful companion. He wasn’t rushing her. All he wanted was a chance to be around and court her, as far as she could discover. True, he was appallingly strange, but it seemed a compromise. And she had always liked the idea of Canada. As for eventually staying with Francis, that seemed very far off. It did not seem like a thing she could ever do. Being friends with him she might compass. Of course, you couldn’t say that it was a fair deal to Francis, but he was bringing it on himself, and really, he deserved the punishment. For of course, Marjorie’s vain little mind said irrepressibly to itself, he would be fonder of her at the end of the try-out than at the beginning. . . . And then a swift wave of anger at him came over her, and she decided on the crest of it. She would never give in to Francis’s courtship. He wasn’t the sort of man she liked. He wasn’t congenial. She had grown beyond him. But he deserved what he was going to get. . . . And she spoke.

“It isn’t fair to you, Francis, because it isn’t going to end the way you hope. But I’ll go to Canada with you . . .”

For a moment she was very sorry she had said it, because Francis forgot himself and caught her in his arms tight, and kissed her hard.

“If you do that sort of thing I won’t!” she said. “That wasn’t in the bargain.”

“I know it wasn’t,” said Francis contritely. “Only you were such a good little sport to promise. I won’t do it again unless you say I may. Honestly, Marjorie. Not even before people.”

This sounded rather topsy-turvy, but after awhile it came to Marjorie what he meant just about the time she climbed out of the car, sat on its step, and watched Francis competently unfurling and setting up two small and seemingly inadequate tents and flooring them with balsam boughs. He meant that there would have to be at least a semblance of friendliness on account of the people they lived among. She felt more frightened than ever.

Francis came up to her as if he had felt the wave of terror that went over her.

“Now you aren’t to worry. I’m going to keep my word. You’re safe with me, Marge. I’m going to take care of you as if I were your brother and your father and your cousin Anna ”

She broke in with an irrepressible giggle.

“Oh, please don’t go that far! Two male relatives will be plenty. . . . I I really got all the care from Cousin Anna that I wanted.”

He looked relieved at her being able to laugh, and bent over the tents again in the moonlight.

“There you are. And here are the blankets. We’re near enough to the road so you won’t be frightened, and enough in the bushes so we’ll be secluded. Good-night. I’ll call you to-morrow, when it’s time to go on. I know this part of the country like my hand, and here’s some water in case you’re thirsty in the night. Oh, and here are towels.”

This last matter-of-fact touch almost set Marjorie off again in hysterical laughter. Being eloped with by a gentleman who thoughtfully set towels and water outside her door was really too much. She pinned the tent together with a hatpin, slipped off some of her clothes it did not seem enough like going to bed to undress altogether, and she mistrusted the balsam boughs with blankets over them that pretended to be a bed in the corner and flung herself down and laughed and laughed and laughed till she nearly cried.

She did not quite cry. The boughs proved to have been arranged by a master hand, and she was very tired and exceedingly sleepy. She pulled hairpins out of her hair in a half-dream, so that they had to be sought for painstakingly next morning when she woke. She burrowed into the blankets, and knew nothing of the world till nine next morning.

“I can’t knock on a tent-flap,” said Francis’s buoyant voice outside then. “But it’s time we were on our way, Marjorie. There ought to be a bathrobe in that bundle of Lucille’s. Slip it on and I’ll show you the brook.”

She reached for a mirror, which showed that, though tousled, she was pretty, took one of the long breaths that seemed so frequently necessary in dealing with Francis, said “in for a penny, in for a pound,” and did as she was directed. The bath-robe wasn’t a bath-robe, but something rather more civilized, which had been, as a matter of fact, part of her trousseau, in that far-off day when trousseaux were so frequently done, and seemed such fun to buy. She came out of the tent rather timidly. “Good gracious, child, that wasn’t what I meant!” exclaimed Francis, seeming appallingly dressed and neat and ready for life. “It’s too cold for that sort of thing. Here!”

He picked up one of the blankets, wrapped it around her, gave her a steer in a direction away from the road, and vanished.

She went down the path he had pushed her toward, holding the towels tight in one hand and her blanket around her in the other. It was fresh that morning, though it was warm for May. And Francis seemed to think that she was going to take a bath in the brook, which even he could not have had heated. She shivered at the idea as she came upon it.

It was an alluring brook, in spite of its unheated state. It was very clear and brown, with a pebbled bottom that you could see into, and a sort of natural round pool, where the current was partly dammed, making it waist-deep. She resolved at first to wash just her face and hands; then she tried an experimental foot, and finished by making a bold plunge straight into the ice-cold middle of it. She shrieked when she was in, and came very straight out, but by the time she was dry she was warmer than ever. She ran back to the tent, laughing in sheer exuberance of spirits, and dressed swiftly. The plunge had stimulated her so that when Francis appeared again she ran toward him, feeling as friendly as if he weren’t married to her at all.

“It was awfully cold but I’m just as hungry as I can be!” she called. “Was there anything to eat in the car, along with the towels?”

Francis seemed unaccountably relieved by her pleasantness. This had been something of a strain on him, after all, though it was the first time such a thought had occurred to Marjorie. His thin, dark face lighted up.

“Everything, including thermos bottles,” he called back. “We won’t stop to build a fire, because we have to hurry; but Lucille ”

“Lucille!” said Marjorie. “Well, I certainly never knew what a wretch that girl was.”

“Oh, not a wretch. Only romantic,” said Francis, grinning. “I tell you again, Marjorie, you have a fatal effect on people. Look at me a matter-of-fact captain of doughboys and the minute I see that you won’t marry me stay married to me, I mean I elope with you in a coach and four!”

“I don’t think you ought to laugh about it,” said Marjorie, sobering down and stopping short in her tracks.

“Well, I shouldn’t,” said Francis penitently. “Only I’m relieved, and a little excited, I suppose. You see, I like your society a lot, and the idea of having it for maybe three months, on any terms you like, is making me so pleased I’m making flippant remarks. I won’t any more, if I remember.”

And he apparently meant it, for he busied himself in exploring the car, which seemed as inexhaustible as the Mother’s Bag in the Swiss Family Robinson, for the food he had spoken of. There was a large basket, which he produced and set on a stump, and from which he took sandwiches, thermos flasks, and last perfidy of Lucille! a tin box of shrimps a la King, carefully wrapped, and ready for reheating. He did it in a little ready-heat affair which also emerged from the basket, and which Marjorie knew well. It was her own, in fact. Reheated shrimps should have killed them both, more especially for breakfast. But they never thought of that till some days later. Marjorie was so overcome by finding her own shrimps facing her, so to speak, that nothing else occurred to her except to eat them. They made a very good breakfast, during which Francis was never flippant once. They talked decorously about the natural scenery fortunately for the conversation there was a great deal of natural scenery in their vicinity and somewhat about pup-tents, and a little about how nice the weather was. After that they cleared up the pieces, repacked everything like magic, and went on their way very amicably.