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 a legitimate compromise; even there he seldom caught Sight of Olga. Then Floss went to Biarritz, and he was alone in all Paris, wasting precious hours at the Deme, in the unacknowledged hope that Olga would walk past, on her way to or from the house a few streets distant.

Sooner or later every lost soul turned up at the Deme,—that was both its attraction and its curse,—and one soggy afternoon in May, when the staleness of his work, combined with his inability to indulge in the refreshing vacations that seemed possible to everyone but his own improvident self had reduced him to a low ebb of vitality, as he dragged tired limbs and jangled nerves along the less sunny side of the Boulevard Raspail toward the inevitable cafe, he caught sight of Hellgren and Mamie Mangum, at a table on the terrasse.

"You're just the one," Mamie greeted him, "to complete the party. We're going up the river for dinner."

Without definitely accepting—for he didn't yet know whether it was a party of three or four,—Grover praised the idea and sat down with them.

"Tomorrow I go to Bordeaux for a conference," Hellgren explained, and Grover's heart made a guilty leap. "We'll celebrate beforehand. When I come back there may be nothing to celebrate."

From this unwieldy attempt at humor Grover guessed that the bourgeois committee of Bordeaux were not seeing eye to eye with the impetuous Scan-