Several times during their irresponsible chatter on the beach between dips her laughter had fallen suddenly, like a dead bird, and she had sat for several minutes as far away from himself and the other men as though they were cut off by a thick wall.

Yesterday, in the evening after dinner, during which her high spirits had infected the whole table, he had walked up and down the board path with her under the vivid white light of a full moon, and she had whipped out one or two such savage things about life that he had been startled.

During their ride that afternoon, too, her bubbling chatter of light stuff about people and things had several times shifted into comments as to the conventions that were so careless as to make him ask himself whether they could really have come from lips so fresh and young.

And why had that queer look of almost childlike grief come into her eyes a moment ago at the sight of ah everyday sunset?
He was mightily intrigued.

She was a queer kid, he told himself, as changeable and difficult to follow as some of the music by men with such weird names as Rachmaninoff and Tschaikowsky that his sister was so precious fond of playing.