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FLAMING

YOUTH

She rose, giving her shoulders the quaint, sliding wriggle with which she was wont to slough off, symbolically, problems too troublesome for solution. “Oh, if those things are going to happen, they happen,” she muttered. “That’s the fate part of it. But I do suppose we can’t go on forever. We'll crash, some way.” “Does anyone suspect? Dee?” “T don’t think so. She’s got troubles enough of her own these days. If it’s anyone, it’s Con. She’s been asking some snoopy kind of questions.” “What questions?” “Oh, I don’t know. I told her to go to the devil; that I was over twelve, and she told me I’d better remember

particularly that I was.” “T don’t like that,” said he. “Oh, well; I don’t like it much, myself.

But what can

she do?”

“Talk.” “Not outside the family. Con isn’t that kind. She might tell Fred.” “That would be a pleasant complication,” he observed grimly. “There will be more and more complications all the time,” she fretted. “If you only weren’t married!” “But I thought “Then there wouldn’t be any kick. We could be supposed to be engaged. I suppose we would be engaged!” she added brightly, as if a new thought had struck her. “Being engaged implies being married eventually,” he pointed out. “Not these days,” she retorted. “It doesn’t hold you up for anything and we could snap out of it when we got
 * he began eagerly.

good and ready.

Only—this isn’t the kind of thing you

can snap out of, is it?”

A cloud darkened the vivacity of —