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 FLAMING

YOUTH

“T’ll bet a bet you are,” was the reply bitterness in it. Miss Parmenter’s pleasantly decorated expression of innocent frankness. ‘What teli me that your Scottie man was slow? winner. I’ve fallen for him like—like an “You can have him. stuff you were working?”

173

with a tinge of

face took on an ever made you I think he’s a avalanche.” But where do you get that Cary

“Start a bath for me, will you, Mike?

Oh, that.

He

asked me to. We’re awful pals. Just like that.” She crooked her two perfectly manicured little fingers together. Pat grunted. “You know you told me to go as far as I liked, dee-rie.” “Well, you did, didn’t you?” “Oh, not half,” cooed the b.f. “He’s going to drive me back home after the wedding.” “That won’t break up my summer!” shouted Pat, from the bathroom, above the seethe of the foaming faucets. She felt a definite sense of injury, not against Cissie so much as against Mr. Scott, who represented, to her annoyed mind, a defection on the part of her own presumptive property. Had Cissie really lured his interest away? Or had he lost interest in her, Pat, anyway? Upon this point her misgivings were allayed by calling to mind the tremulous hand with which he had recovered that sheet of music.

Yet he had resisted the lure of her touch, the

mute offer of her lips. Accustomed to the potency of physical appeal upon men, she felt at a loss. True, what had drawn her to Scott had been his enjoyment of that in her which underlay the surface, his capacity for appreciating in her qualities and potentialities which she herself felt only dimly and doubtfully when the influence of his presence was remote. Yet that he should find he