The sailing-party disembarked at the landing steps of the “Princess” shortly after six o’clock, and were greeted by a tall young man whose face was almost concealed by the broad brim of his hat, turned down as if to protect its owner from possible prostration from the sun. At the opposite end of the young man the white trouser-legs were turned up at least two laps higher than would have been expected, so that hat and trousers together made a normal average. Below the turn-up of the trousers showed a considerable expanse of white-silk hosiery, terminating in spotless white buckskin shoes; below the down-turned hat-brim was a grin which extended well across the boyish face. Altogether, the young man warranted the attention he attracted.

The skipper made so perfect a landing that the identity of those on board was disclosed only at the last moment; but the single glance the young man had was sufficient to reassure him, and he stepped forward eagerly.

“Hello, everybody!” he cried cheerfully. “Wish you Happy New-Year!”

Merry was the first to grasp the significance of the excitement. “Why, it’s Billy Huntington!” she exclaimed.

“Of course,” he admitted, still grinning; “who else would charge down here like a young dace just for the pleasure of wishing you the compliments of the season?”

The young man paused long enough to assist the ladies over the rail, with a greeting to each.

“There’s your uncle,” Merry said, nodding in the direction of the men; “don’t you recognize him?”

“Surest thing you know,” Billy answered, still hanging back. “I’m waiting to see if he will recognize me, under all the circumstances.”

“Come here, you young rascal,” Huntington responded to the implied question as he stepped on the pier; “come here and give an account of yourself.”

“Well,” Billy replied slowly, clinging to the extended hand as a refuge, “you see I didn’t know Mr. Cosden came down with you, and it was vacation, and I thought you’d be awfully lonely here without me ”

“I see,” his uncle said dryly; “it was all on my account.”

Billy seemed to feel the necessity of further explanation. “Of course I knew Merry the Thatchers were here. Phil told me ”

“Too bad Philip couldn’t have come with you,” Mrs. Thatcher remarked.

“Yes; he went up to the Lawrences’ house-party for over Christmas as he planned.”

“How did you leave your worthy parents?” Huntington inquired.

A look of dismay passed over the boy’s face. “I forgot to telegraph them from New York, and I meant to cable just as soon as I arrived.” Then an expression of relief came to his assistance: “But they’ll know I’m with you somewhere.”

Huntington sighed. “Another reckoning for me when I return!” he said resignedly; “but it’s worth it all to know that you ’charged down here like a young dace’ as soon as you realized your poor uncle’s ’awful loneliness.’”

“Then it was you who tried to signal us from the tender?” Merry came to his rescue.

“Yes; I thought it was you; I wigwagged until I almost plunged overboard. I’ve got to go back Monday, to reach Cambridge in time to register, so I hated to lose a whole day out of three.”

“There’s one thing about a college education which Mr. Huntington didn’t mention last evening,” Thatcher remarked to Cosden as they walked toward the bar for the anteprandial cocktail; “it gives a boy freedom of action and breadth of imagination.”

“Huntington left out a whole lot of things he might have touched on,” Cosden said testily. “That’s a topic on which we don’t agree, and never shall. There is a boy with many sterling qualities going to waste because Monty has more wishbone than backbone in the matter of discipline.”

“Don’t get started on that, Connie,” Huntington’s voice came from the rear. “I’ve no doubt it’s deserved, but that boy keeps me from remembering that my own days of irresponsibility are so far behind me. I believe I enjoy him the more because I haven’t a parent’s duty to perform.”

“It’s a sort of reciprocity without personal liability,” laughed Thatcher.

“Exactly. I wonder sometimes if what we gain by experience is worth what we lose in illusion. Aren’t you coming up-stairs to dress for dinner, Billy?” Huntington continued, as his nephew and Merry walked past them, engaged in an animated conversation.

“Don’t wait for me,” was the prompt response. “I’m a bear at dressing, and I’ll be ready before Dixon has put in your collar-studs.”

“I feel easier down here since I know that you’re off duty, too, and not likely to upset my apple-cart while I’m away,” Thatcher remarked to Cosden with a smile. “Did you know, Mr. Huntington,” he continued, turning, “that your friend is a wrecker of other men’s plans?”

“It’s the best thing he does,” Huntington agreed promptly. “That exactly explains my presence here.”

Cosden was immensely pleased by Thatcher’s acknowledgment of his importance, but he tried to carry it off lightly.

“Oh, well,” he said indifferently, “you must let me have my innings once in a while. I have to get to you sometimes to make up for other bouts which I’ve been glad to forget.”

“You’ll join us, of course,” Thatcher added, to Huntington.

“I can resist anything but temptation,” Huntington replied soberly; “I love the enemy.”

“This cocktail-drinking is a curious thing,” Thatcher remarked. “In cold weather we take it to warm us up, in warm weather to cool us off; when we are depressed it is to cheer us, and when we’re happy it’s because we want to celebrate. And there you are. How about the Consolidated Machinery deal?” Thatcher changed the subject abruptly, and spoke to Cosden. “Are we going to fight each other on that?”

“I’m afraid we’ll have to,” Cosden admitted frankly; “but I’ll be glad to talk it over with you. From here, the interests look too far apart even to compromise.”

Cosden and Huntington went up in the elevator together, leaving Thatcher on the piazza.

“What the devil did that young cub show up here for just at this time?” Cosden demanded.

“Didn’t you hear?” Monty explained innocently. “He wanted to cheer me up in my ‘awful loneliness.’”

“Lonely fiddlesticks!” Cosden protested irritably. “Don’t you grasp the fact that his coming is going to mess things up?”

“Why, no,” Huntington said slowly, pausing at the door of his room to give his friend opportunity to finish his remarks; “I can’t for the life of me see that.”

“Don’t you see that it’s Merry Thatcher the kid is making up to?”

“Oh, ho!” Huntington exclaimed. “So that’s the situation! It was stupid of me not to understand.”

“Well, that’s it; and I won’t have it.”

“Of course you won’t; but how are you going to stop it?”

“That’s your job, Monty. It’s up to you to send him about his business.”

“That doesn’t appeal to me as a sporting proposition,” Huntington said after a moment’s deliberation. “I didn’t come down here to help you get a corner in anything, but merely as an observer, and to give you expert advice. Now you suggest a combination trust, as it were of two full-grown men against a half-baked boy. It isn’t worthy of you, Connie, and I’m not sure that it isn’t an illegal restraint of trade. Oh, no; I couldn’t think of it.”

“I’d like to see you in the same situation just once,” growled Cosden. “Why the devil can’t you send the boy home?”

“If I did, he’d come back so quick he’d meet himself going away,” Huntington said gravely; “but as a matter of fact I understand that he plans to go on Monday, and there’s no boat sailing before then anyhow.”

He opened the door of his room and stepped inside.

“I might add, Connie,” he continued, “that if you’re afraid to take chances with a boy like that I don’t feel much confidence in the final outcome of your bénédictine expedition.”

“I’m serious in this,” Cosden snapped back. “My bump of humor evidently got light-struck in the developing. Billy has twenty years ahead of him to pick out a girl while I haven’t, and he must understand that I mean business.”

“Of course he must,” agreed Huntington. “It hadn’t occurred to me until you spoke of it that there was the remotest chance of having Billy show sense enough to become interested in any girl so well calculated to make a man of him. In fact, I doubt very much whether his own intellect has carried him so far. It’s all right for you or me to contemplate committing matrimony, but a young man, in these days of increasing cost of everything, is likely to become a grandfather before he can afford to be a father. Only the other day, Connie, the thought came to me that if this high cost of living continues it will make death a necessity of life.”

“You are evidently in no frame of mind to discuss anything serious now,” Cosden retorted; “I’ll wait until after dinner.”

“Do!” Huntington’s face brightened. “Look at the reproachful expression on the bosom of that beautiful white shirt which Dixon has laid out for me. Can’t you almost hear the pathos in its tone as it asks to be filled?”

The door slammed, and Cosden’s heavy tread could be heard as he disgustedly retreated down the hall to his own room.

One of the compensations of maturity is that the adjustment of proper proportions comes more quickly than to youth. It may be that Cosden saw the modicum of truth which lay beneath his friend’s bantering; it may be that he was ashamed to have shown any uncertainty in his mind as to the final outcome of his embassy. At all events, he seemed to be in the best of humor when he dined with Huntington and the boy, and even accepted with good grace the unexpected announcement that Billy and Merry were to “take in” the dance at the “Hamilton.” It may be that he was determined to demonstrate his strength of mind, for when the little party reassembled on the piazza, and the young people disappeared soon after the coffee, he devoted himself to Edith Stevens with an assiduity which caused Huntington to smile quietly to himself. Stevens and Thatcher, finding the ladies well provided for, went down-stairs for a game of billiards. Mrs. Thatcher cheerfully accepted Huntington’s invitation to stroll to the pier, leaving Miss Stevens and Cosden by themselves.

“I’ve made an appointment for you on Monday morning,” Thatcher remarked to Cosden as he passed by.

“Good! I’ll keep it,” was the prompt response.

“What do you think of Marian’s resurrection?” Edith asked him when they were alone.

Cosden looked in the direction of the pier. “Do you mean ” he began.

“Oh, no!” she interrupted him. “That is merely a revival, which I imagine may develop into an experience meeting. I mean Mr. Hamlen. Think of a devotion that forces a man to bury himself for twenty years! I could throw myself on his neck for restoring my lost belief in the constancy of man.”

“I hadn’t heard that side of the story,” Cosden observed.

“It was while we were at school together,” Edith explained. “Marian was irresistible then as now, and every man she met lost his head altogether; but for a time she and Mr. Hamlen were engaged. Then she married the last man we expected; but she and Harry have been very happy. It simply shows that you never can tell.”

“Did you know Hamlen then?”

“No; but I heard enough about him. If he had been merely intelligent instead of intellectual he might have had her just as well as not. He simply frightened her out of it.”

“Where did Monty come in?”

“I never heard of him; things couldn’t have gone very far.”

“You remember what he said just before we started out this morning? I know him pretty well and Monty doesn’t speak like that unless there is something back of it.”

“Well,” Edith laughed, “I’m sure I should have known, even so. Why, I could reel off so many names that you would think Marian was a heartless coquette; but it wasn’t that at all. She simply loved attention, as all women do.”

“How about the daughter?” queried Cosden.

“Merry?” Miss Stevens interrogated. “Oh, Merry is an up-to-date, twentieth-century thoroughbred. Marian has never known just what to make of her because she isn’t like other girls, but to my mind the comparison is all to her credit. I’m generous when I give the child so good a character, for I know she heartily disapproves of me.”

Cosden was pleased with the intuition he had shown in his selection. “I should think young Huntington would bore her about as much as a youngster in kilts,” he said, to draw her out.

“He is her brother’s friend, she adores athletics and dancing, and she is exercising the prerogative of her age and sex.”

There was a silence of several moments, during which time Cosden was debating with himself whether it was too late for him to bring his dancing of the vintage of the nineties up to the present confusion of innovations. He had scoffed at modern dances but it might become necessary to revise his views.

“What an unusual ring you have,” Miss Stevens exclaimed, leaning over his hand which rested upon the arm of his chair. “Is there a romance connected with it?”

Cosden took it off and handed it to her. “No,” he said. “When you know me better you will understand that romance doesn’t come into my make-up. I bought that ring myself particularly to avoid any sentiment. I can take it off when I like, wear it or not as I choose, and if I lose it nobody’s heart is broken.”

“That is an original idea,” she laughed; then her face sobered. “I used to think romance was everything,” she said seriously. “Now I wonder if what we call romance isn’t another word for illusion. As I look back at my girl friends and see how many romances became tragedies, and how many matter-of-fact marriages, like Marian’s and Harry’s, have developed into real unions, I’m inclined to think that romance is a form of hypnotism.”

“You’ve expressed my idea to a dot,” Cosden replied emphatically. “Huntington is a sentimentalist, and he stamps my common-sense ideas as evidences of a commercial instinct. I’ve seen just what you’ve seen, and I believe that the business of life rests on exactly the same basis as the business of trade.”

“Take Harry Thatcher, for example,” Edith continued her own conversation rather than replied to his; “there’s nothing brilliant about him outside his business success, but you always know where to find him. He’s a comfortable man to have around. With men, they say he dominates everything he goes into, but in his home, well, every now and then he stands out just on principle, but as a matter of fact even his ideas are in his wife’s name.”

Mrs. Thatcher and Huntington approached them returning from their moon-bath on the steps of the pier.

“Did you ever see so wonderful a night, Edith?” she exclaimed with enthusiasm. “This atmosphere, and the renewing of my friendship with Mr. Huntington, make me feel like a girl again.”

“Monty must have been composing poetry,” Cosden remarked.

“No,” Huntington disclaimed promptly; “poetry is the one contagious disease of youth which I have escaped. But Mrs. Thatcher has helped me to set back my clock of life more than twenty years, and that is an achievement of which I feel justly proud.”