Page:Barbour--Peggy in the rain.djvu/56

 He laughed as he arose. "Not even that?"

"Not even that."

"Do you know, Leona, I believe you're queering your own game?"

"In what way?"

"By—well, by flaunting the 'Keep off the Grass' sign too violently. The grass begins to look terribly inviting. Good night."

The Northern mail had arrived at the hotel during his absence, and Gordon found a letter from his mother. Mrs. Ames wrote regularly to her son and married daughter every Monday afternoon at a certain hour. She was the kind of woman whose life is ruled off into squares, with a duty for each square. Gordon had declared once that the notion that the country set its clocks by the Government Observatory was exploded, that the clocks were corrected every morning at seven-fifteen, when his mother rang for her maid, and again at four-thirty in the afternoon, when Hurd, the butler, paraded solemnly into the drawing-room with the tea-cart. There was only one portion of Mrs. Ames' four pages—she always wrote four pages; never more nor less—that interested Gordon, and that only slightly.