with everything vigorously under way, and the actual sailing day in sight, xenophon curry was calling on his friend and benefactress, flora utterbourne, to express for perhaps the hundredth time his overwhelming gratitude. he stirred his tea happily and looked about the little drawing room which flora had made so much her own with the assistance of sales and auctions. glancing about one understood flora’s success.

the tea things stood between them on the very gate-legged table acquired at crawl hill, and in which the impresario insisted upon feeling a whimsical part interest. flora had just returned from a luncheon party—they had met, as a matter of fact, on her threshold—and as they sipped and chatted she informally lifted off a hat of faun straw and figured silk, thrusting the pins back into it, with the veil still where it had been brushed up out of the way across the crown. she laid the hat aside and touched her hair comfortably. his response to the geniality of this hour of early twilight, with a small clock ticking somewhere, was very whole-hearted, though of course sentimental, because everything about the impresario was sentimental.

some turn or other in the talk presently brought up the subject of his rings. “i’ve been noticing them,” she smiled. “it seems to me i’ve never seen so many—and some of the ‘stones’ seem quite wonderful!”

“i know,” he laughed, “there are a good many more than there ought to be, but i get so attached to each new one that drops into my hands, i couldn’t bear to give any of ’em up.”

“good gracious!” she exclaimed. “do they really come as easily as all that?”

“oh, well,” he confided, “it’s become a sort of custom that when one of my songbirds is offered a contract by one[66] of the big managers and has to leave me—and i want to tell you i’ve discovered more than one now famous star and given the boost to begin with!—then i get a ring in remembrance. sometimes it will be a great big stone—like this one, you see? then again a more modest size, like this one. it depends,” he added confidentially, “a little on the contract; but i love every single ring on my fingers exactly the same, because each one stands for a songbird.”

“a songbird who has flown away,” she murmured, her fine eyes a little sad.

“yes,” he sighed. “but it can’t be helped, and it doesn’t mean, you know, that they don’t go right on being loyal. we all have to make our way in the world. lord, if it isn’t one thing it’s another! money’s the main difficulty, and what can you hope to do if you never had any?”

ah, what indeed? the impresario set down his cup thoughtfully; and a moment later she sympathetically brought out her own special phase of that curious irony they had spoken of at the auction. “no one would think, to see how ‘entrenched’ we look, that i’d be out of here, ‘bag and baggage,’ early in the morning!”

“what?” cried mr. curry, really quite shaken.

she nodded and smiled at him over a slice of caramel cake she was nibbling.

“tomorrow!”

“it’s really heart-breaking,” she admitted slowly, “though when i’ve had time to grow a little interested in the new ‘apartment’ it won’t matter. but it did strike me as so irresistibly funny, sitting here with you ‘over the teacups,’ that at eight o’clock the men will be at the door for my trunks!”

suddenly he leaned toward her with great earnestness. “miss utterbourne, i want to ask you a favour.”

“yes?” her brows were arched in cordial interrogation.

“it—it’s about this table—table we bought,” he said, quite steadily despite the brazen pronoun, and fixing her with his honest, eager gaze.

“of course,” she laughed softly, and with a subtle note of warm joyousness, “i’ve always thought of it as ‘our’ table! i shall never think of it otherwise!”

“well, i want to ask you,” he continued, earnestly thumping with one sparkling finger, “not to leave the table behind.” she coloured a little, and he pressed on: “i want you to take it with you to the new apartment for a kind of nucleus—to begin building around!”

“ah,” she sighed lightly, but with a gently glowing graciousness, “you’re a diabolical tempter at my elbow, for i’m sure you know my weakness for ‘gate-legged’ tables!”

“i guess i have a weakness for them, too,” he admitted doggedly.

“well,” she laughed, blushing still more happily, “then i’m afraid the table will have to go along, really, though i’m sure the people who are subletting will notice! what would sound most plausible, do you think?” she was growing quite excited. “for it would hardly do to tell quite the facts—would it?”