ing a railroad, and four or five mines in Mexico. Bohm represents Christianity in the firm. At Newport they call him the military attaché to Jerusalem. He's the big chap that sat behind me in the car. He'll marry Kitty as soon as she can get her divorce. Bohm's a jolly old sort — and I tell you, you old sourbelly, you're letting this Southern moss grow over you a bit. Hey? What? 'Yellow rich' isn't half bad, and I'll say it myself, and pretend it's mine; but hang it, old man, their children won't be worse than lemon-colored, and the grandchildren will be white!"

“Just in time,” I exclaimed, “to take a back seat with their evaporated fortunes!”

Beverly chuckled. "Well, if they do evaporate, there will be new ones. Now don't walk along making Mayflower eyes at me. I'm no Puritan, and my people have had a front seat since pretty early in the game, which I'm holding on to, you know. And by Jove, old man, I tell you, if you wish to hold on nowadays, you can't be drawing lines! If you don't want to see yourself jolly well replaced, you must fall in with the replacers. Our blooming old republic is merely the quickest process of endless replacing yet discovered, and you take my tip, and back the replacers! That's where Miss Rieppe, for all her Kings Port traditions, shows sense."

I turned square on him. "Then she has broken it ? "

"Broken what?"

"Her engagement to John Mayrant. You mean to say that you didn't-?"

"See here, old man. Seriously. The fire-eater?"

I was so very much bewildered that I merely stared at Beverly Rodgers. Of course, I might have known that Miss Rieppe would not feel the need of announcing to her rich Northern friends an engagement which she had fallen into the habit of postponing.

But Beverly had a better right to be taken aback. "I suppose you must have some reason for your remark," he said.

"You don't mean that you're engaged to her?" I shot out.

"Me? With my poor little fifteen thousand a year? Consider, dear boy! playing at it, she and I.

But Charley

"He is?" I shouted.

Oh, no, we're merely She's a good player.

"I don't know, old man, and I don't think he knows - yet."

Beverly," said I, "let me tell you.” And I told him.

After he had got himself adjusted to the novelty of it he began to take it with a series of thoughtful chuckles.

Into these I dropped with: "Where's her father, anyhow?" I began to feel, fantastically, that she mightn't have a father.

He stopped in Savannah," Beverly answered. "He's coming over by the train. Kitty - Charley's sister, Mrs. Bleecker-did the chaperoning for us."

"Very expertly, I should guess," I said.

Perfectly; invisibly," said Beverly. And he returned to his thoughts and his chuckles.

“After all, it's simple," he presently remarked.

"Doesn't that depend on what she's here for?” "Oh, to break it.'

"Why come for that?"

He took another turn among his cogitations. I took a number of turns among my own, but it was merely walking round and round in a circle.

"When will she announce it, then?" he demanded.

“Ah!” I murmured. “You said she was a good player."

"But a fire-eater!" he resumed. "For her. Oh, hang it! She'll let him go!"

"Then why hasn't she?"

He hesitated. "Well, of course her game could be spoiled by-"

His speech died away into more cogitation, and I had to ask him what he meant.

"By love getting into it somewhere."

We walked on through Worship Street, which we had reached some while since, and the chief features of which I mechanically pointed out to him.

"Jolly old church, that," said Beverly, as we reached my favorite corner and brick wall. “Well, I'll not announce it!" he murmured gallantly.

"My dear man," I said, " Kings Port will do all the announcing for you to-morrow."

XV

WHAT SHE CAME TO SEE

BUT in this matter my prognostication was thoroughly at fault; yet surely, knowing Kings Port's sovereign habit, as I had had good cause to know it, I was scarce beyond reasonable bounds in supposing that the arrival of Miss Rieppe would heat up some very general and very audible talk about this approaching marriage, against which the prejudices of the town were set in such compact array. I have several times mentioned that Kings Port, to my sense, was buzzing over John Mayrant's affairs; buzzing in the open, where one could hear it, and buzzing behind closed doors, where one could somehow feel it; I can only say that henceforth this buzzing ceased, dropped wholly away, as if Gossip were watching so hard that she forgot to talk, giving place to a great stillness in her kingdom. Such occasional words as were uttered sounded oddly and egregiously clear in the new-established void.

The first of these words sounded, indeed, quite enormous, issuing as it did from Juno's lips at our breakfast-table, when yesterday's meeting on the New Bridge was investing my mind with many thoughts. She addressed me in one of her favorite tones (I have met it, thank God! but in two or

three other cases during my whole experience), which always somehow conveyed to you that you were personally to blame for what she was going to tell you.

"I suppose you know that your friend, Mr. Mayrant, has resigned from the Custom House?"

I was, of course, careful not to give Juno the pleasure of seeing that she had surprised me. I bowed, and continued in silence to sip a little coffee; then, setting my coffee down, I observed that it would be some few days yet before the resignation could take effect; and, noticing that Juno was getting ready some new remark, I branched off and spoke to her of my excursion up the river this morning to see the azaleas in the gardens at Live Oaks.

"How lucky the weather is so magnificent!" I exclaimed.

"I shall be interested to hear," said Juno, "what explanation he finds to give Miss Josephine for his disrespectful holding out against her, and his immediate yielding to Miss Rieppe."

Here I deemed it safe to ask her, was she quite sure it had been at the instance of Miss Rieppe that John had resigned?

"It follows suspiciously close upon her arrival," stated Juno. She might have been speaking of a murder. “And how he expects to support a wife now—well, that is no affair of mine," Juno concluded, with a washing-her-hands-of-it air, as if up to this point she had always done her best for the wilful boy. She had blamed him savagely for not resigning, and now she was blaming him because he had resigned; and I ate my breakfast