Everett Van Allen Hale fixed his single eye-glass in place and leaned over his aunt’s chair.

“Who,” he queried, in that leisurely voice that failed to accord with his height and athletic figure, “who is the girl in the alcove?”

Mrs Hale shrugged, glancing across the hotel ballroom.

“A Miss Amethyst St. Clare,” she responded.

“I beg pardon!”

“No, you heard perfectly well. That is the name on the register. And that is all any one knows. She is here alone, unchaperoned, in this hotel. The clerk says the rooms were telegraphed for, in advance, and that some man was to join her. But she has been here almost a month and no one does come––I fancy no one ever will. It looks very strange to everybody, of course.”

“It is nearly midnight,” mused Mr. Hale. “I haven’t seen her dance yet, nor has any one spoken to her.”

His aunt again shrugged her handsome, matronly shoulders, unfurling her fan.

“No. She doesn’t know any one. I am astonished that she should have come to this exclusive place. People might have passed over the name, and even the preposterous jewels she wears, but her hair is too bad. Shall I present you to Peggy Arkwright, Everett? Have you heard that her aunt died last winter, and left Peggy a neat little fortune? A charming girl?”

“That hair would be hard to pass over,” her nephew murmured, his meditative gray eyes still fixed on the alcove. “Thank you, aunt. I think I’ll meet Miss Arkwright later. I have an engagement for the present.”

There could be no question as to the quantity of hair worn by Miss Amethyst St. Clare. The brilliant copper-gold tresses weighted her small head; coil upon coil, puff upon puff, the exaggerated abundance was piled.

The offense against taste was the more flagrant because the newest mode affected simplicity, and other women wore smooth, artfully demure coiffures. Miss St. Clare was not only preposterous, she was six months behind the fashion.

For the rest, her small face and figure were pretty, if not beautiful, and her vivid complexion must have compelled admiration if her hair had not suggested rouge and pearl-powder as its natural accompaniment.

When Hale returned to the ballroom in the company of the lean, solemn-faced proprietor of the hotel, the girl in the alcove was sitting in exactly the same attitude of grave contemplation that she had maintained all the evening.

Her hands were folded in the lap of her pale-blue frock, her small feet were crossed, in their pale-blue, silver-buckled dancing-slippers that had not danced. There was dejection in the droop of her supple young boy, and the disappointment of youth denied its rights.

At the advancing couple she did not look, until they halted beside her.

“Miss St. Clare, Mr. Hale has asked the pleasure of meeting you,” announced the hotel’s owner solemnly. “With your permission.”

Amazed, she raised her large, purple-blue eyes to Hale’s face, a sudden wave of color sweeping her cheeks. The landlord discreetly retired.

“Oh!” she faltered, quite helplessly.

“Have I presumed too far?” Hale doubted, with his pleasant ease, looking down at her. “You see, your people and mine don’t seem to know each other, and I did want to ask you to let me have a dance.”

The incredulity and shrinking died from her gaze; like an impulsive child she put out her hand.

“Oh, thank you!” she exclaimed naively. “I should love it.”

He sat down beside her, and they looked at each other.

There was no doubt that the preposterous hair was very becoming and exquisite in color, thrown into contrast by her darker eyebrows and lashes; the curve of her red mouth was childishly sweet. From across the room Hale saw his aunt’s stare fixed on him with frozen astonishment, and the compassion which had led him to the girl’s side hardened into determination.

“I only arrived from the city this afternoon, or I should have asked the privilege of meeting you before now,” he observed. “Business kept me in town; even a struggling young lawyer has some business.”

“I know you just came,” she agreed. “I––I saw you arrive. I have plenty of time to watch other people, because I’m all alone. But I didn’t suppose you––well––worked.”

“Might I inquire why not?”

“Why you had so many golf-clubs, and a bulldog on a leash, and––and––”

He waited expectantly, enjoying himself for the first time that evening.

“And––you wear a monocle,” in a rush of frankness. “We somehow thought that men who wore them just––just played.”

“We?” he interrogated.

“West. I’m from Nevada. That is why I’m here alone. Father sent me here to have a good time until he came. First we went to New York to buy things, then I came here to wait for him.”

Buy things, yes! And some one had loaded that pretty head with monstrous erections of hair in the name of fashion, Hale reflected indignantly. No doubt, father and daughter had saved and planned for one summer of Eastern gayety, and had met this.

The music was recommencing. He rose and bowed. She should have the remainder of this evening, at least.

“You know we are just as subject to error,” he said. “We fancy all Western girls are tanned nut-brown and ride wild horses.”

She laughed, laying her hand on his arm.

“I’m too blond to tan, but I do ride.”

She danced charmingly, with contagious delight.

“I thought no one would ask me to dance, ever,” she avowed frankly, lifting her eyes to his in half-shy gratitude. Meeting those eyes, Hale divined in a flash of inspiration why a romantic godparent had named her Amethyst.

“Many would ask if they dared,” he soothed.

“Why didn’t they dare?”

“They do not know you.”

“You dared.”

“I have a sinful wilfulness in taking what I want.”

She looked at him in grave appraisal, as no girl ever had looked at him before, a glance of clear-eyed scrutiny that cleaved deep as a clean blade.

“I guess you never wanted anything very sinful,” she rendered verdict.

“Thank you,” acknowledged Hale, a little startled. And after a moment: “I hope not.”

The music closed with a crash of the combined instruments.

The girl involuntarily turned toward the alcove, but her companion fixed his eye-glass more firmly and guided her away from that dreary place of pillory.

“May I bring you an ice?” he offered, perfectly aware that the evening’s refreshments had passed her by. “And won’t you try these seats near the window, where it is cooler?”

She had expected him to leave her after the dance; he read it in the surprised gladness of her transparent face.

“Thank you,” she accepted happily. “A pink one, please––I have been watching people eat those raspberry ices all the evening, until I wanted to snatch one as they were carried past.”

What Hale thought of the assembled company might have been interpreted from his expression as he went on his errand. A girl with the stamp of innocence in every glance and virginal line of her too-slim young body, she had been brutally sent to the Coventry of ostracism because she did not know how to dress and possessed a romantic name.

Young ladies might be named Ruby, or Beryl, or Pearl, it appeared, but not Amethyst. As for the lacking chaperon, what more natural in frank Western eyes than for her to wait here for her father?

They ate their raspberry ice together. When Miss St. Clare drew off her glove, Hale saw the diamonds of which his aunt had spoken. They were quite as preposterous as the high-piled hair; if they had been genuine, the unprotected young girl would have carried several thousand dollars on her slender fingers. But they glittered bravely; like the coiffure, they suited her in some indefinable way.

Afterward they danced again. The intricate masses of copper-gold floss brushed Hale’s shoulder as they moved, and he looked down at them in comic dismay. How is it possible to inform a lady that she wears too much hair?

At the end of the dance Miss St Clare looked up at her partner, softly flushed, but resolute.

“You’ve been awfully good,” she said. “I think I will go up-stairs now.”

She was right, and he knew it. It would attract too much remark for them to remain together longer, yet he could not leave her alone. His respect for her increased.

“Thank you for a delightful hour,” he yielded to the decision. “I wonder if you would give me a game of tennis to-morrow morning?”

Her amethyst eyes dilated, and grew wistful.

“I should love it, but I don’t know how to play.”

“May I not teach you?”

“Really? It wouldn’t be a trouble, Mr. Hale?”

“It would be a great pleasure. And––”

They were in the hall now, at the foot of the stairs, and the step she had ascended brought their eyes level.

“I’d like to say that I don’t wear this eye-glass from affectation,” he submitted. “A golf-ball struck my right eye last year, and I’m resting it. I hope to leave the thing off, some day.”

“Oh!!” she gasped, aflame with blushes. “Oh, I like it!” And fled.

Mr. Hale sought his aunt later.

“I’ve been talking to Miss St. Clare,” he observed. “You people have been badly mistaken. She is altogether the kind of a girl you would like, but she is from the West, and some New York shopkeepers have taught her to dress––er––differently. She is waiting for her father, who is to join her here.”

“That you have been talking to her has been obvious to the whole room,” retorted Mrs. Hale. “As for her being Western, I have met a great many Western people, and they were not in the least like that.”

“I am going to introduce her to you to-morrow.”

“You will be good enough to do nothing of the kind. The girl is an actress.”

“I have known charming actresses.”

“You know very well what I mean. She is playing a part. I do not believe she is from the West; I do not believe in her never-appearing father. That hair!”

Mr. Hale prepared to depart.

“You’ll be conventional in public, of course,” he assumed.

His aunt surveyed him grimly.

“I am not a savage. I suppose there is no use warning you Everett; you always have your own way.”

“Thank you,” said Everett.

He did present Miss St. Clare to Mrs. Hale, on the way to breakfast, next morning. The ceremony passed with frigid and impeccable courtesy on the matron’s side, to which the girl opposed a serious, proudly shy dignity of her own. If she played a part, she played it consistently.

Later, the tennis lesson was given. In the morning sunlight the wonderful hair gleamed, the morning breeze dragged free little curls and fluttered them about the girl’s face.

Hale decided that they must be her own, and regretted the high-piled mass that superfluously surmounted such dainty tendrils. She was prettier than he had thought, in her white linen frock, with a violet ribbon at the collar that matched her eyes.

When the game ended Hale did a daring and an uncertain thing. Before the startled Miss St. Clare realized his intention, he led her into the very center of the hotel’s younger set, congregated as usual on that side of the wide veranda. Nearly all knew him; to those who offered gay greeting he introduced his companion.

Miss Amethyst St. Clare was received decently, then ignored as much as possible by the women. But they could not insult a girl of whom no evil was known except an exaggerated coiffure. Hale had compelled a bowing acquaintance for her. No longer did she pass through halls and parlors an unsaluted, unnoticed outlaw.

The men went further. Soon Miss St. Clare might have had all the masculine attention she wanted, since Everett Hale had thrown open the barriers. But she refused all intimate companionship, holding herself aloof from those who had shunned her.

She could not have chosen a better lure. Piqued and resentful, the men sought keenly the girl who withheld her society––and sought in vain.

“Since they did not want to know me at first, they shall not now!” she flashed one day to Hale. “The women don’t want to know me at all. I can’t understand why, but it’s so, it’s so! Oh don’t shake your head, Mr. Hale––I know! I never did anything to them, but it’s so.”

It was the second week of their friendship, a friendship that had brought them much together, in spite of the man-of-the-world’s care not to compromise the young girl by too conspicuous attentions.

They were seated on a bench placed beneath a clump of flowering althea bushes at a corner of the lawn. Velvet shadows brocaded the bright grass; a ray of sunshine touched its golden finger to Miss St. Clare’s hot cheek. Hale drew a deep breath of the pine-scented air, and plunged into that icy well of frankness at whose bottom lies truth.

“Perhaps they are jealous of your gowns, or jewels, or something,” he essayed lamely. “Women are like that, I’ve been told. Perhaps if you wore your hair––er––differently––plainer––”

The plunge was taken. Flinching from consequences, he waited.

“But I can’t fix it any other way?” she exclaimed, distressed. “At home, I just used to raid it, but of course I knew that would never do here. I took lessons from a hair-dresser in New York before I could fix it this way. I couldn’t make it look like theirs. Oh, don’t you like it?”

“I think it is beautiful,” assured Hale, in a fever of eagerness and remorse. “Honestly, I admire it immensely! I only thought, since you asked me, that the other women might––might––”

She innocently came to his aid.

“Yes, they might. But if you like it, I don’t care. Soon I will go away and never see them.”

“Like it!” he echoed. “Like it!” He checked himself, aghast at the self-revelation that confronted him.

He was in love, seriously in love for the first time since his school-days. The more he contemplated it the more serious the emotion loomed. He was in love with a girl named Amethyst St. Clare, who wore pounds of copper-colored hair and incredible diamonds, who had no visible relatives, and whom his world ostracized on sight. In love with her, and unashamed of it.

The ardor of his broken exclamation had sent the soft color to her forehead. A little frightened and embarrassed, she dropped her dark lashes and looked down at the small hands clasped in her lap. Hale scrutinized her deliberately, a slow, heady recklessness mounting through him.

To marry on his income meant to resign all the bachelor luxuries he was accustomed to enjoy––to give up the motor-car he had recently acquired, to drop out of several expensive clubs, to live in a cramped apartment or in the suburbs. Well, does a girl give up nothing when she marries? Had anything in his indulgent life yielded him an emotion comparable to this strong sweep of excitement and tenderness?

“Amethyst,” he said, his voice changed in his own hearing. “Amethyst!”

She started slightly, her breath caught and fluttered as she turned her face to him without lifting her lashes. There was no formal proposal. Primitively dumb as a cave-man he took her in his arms and pressed his lips against her fresh young mouth, the master in possession.

Laughter and approaching voices sounded from a neighboring path, heralding a returning party from the golf-links. The girl opened her violet-blue eyes, radiant with gladness and exquisite shyness, and still more exquisite submission to this new rule.

“Please,” she whispered, rose-hued.

It was a different Hale who looked at her; not a boy flushed in exultation at a love-victory, but a man in the dignity of realized manhood, who is to be husband and father, protector and breadwinner. Because he did not himself comprehend what had overtaken him, he was wordless. He gently released her, but with the new instinct of protection he rose and walked beside her to the hotel, guarding her retreat from the advancing group.

There are many kinds of kisses; that which they had exchanged comes once in each life. They separated on the crowded veranda, without further speech, but as conscious of betrothal as any ceremony could have made them.

Hale dressed for dinner, then went to his aunt’s private sitting-room.

“I want to bring Miss St. Clare to our table after this,” he announced, surveying the handsome old lady who stood before a mirror, wielding a powder-puff.

“Everett! Never!”

“Then I shall go sit at hers.”

Mrs. Hale set the puff in a jar of cold-cream and faced her nephew.

“You mean to force that girl upon me, Everett Hale?”

“Not at all; only to say that you must accept both of us, or neither.”

“You don’t mean––you can’t mean that you are made enough to be serious? You?”

“I think, said Hale slowly, “that I am sane for the first time in my life. And I’m going to stay sane. Shall I bring Miss St. Clare to our table?”

“If you do, I shall leave it!” warned his suffocating kinswoman.

He nodded acceptance of the decision, and went down-stairs.

But neither challenge was put to the test Miss St. Clare did not come down to dinner until Mrs. Hale had dined and departed. Hale waited in the hall, ready to meet the small descending figure when it appeared.

“May I dine with you?” he asked, as she paused before him.

She wore the pale-blue gown of their first meeting, and a little of that first evening’s timidity had returned to her bearing.

“Dare you?” she countered.

“You know I hope to do so all our lives, Amethyst.”

For the first time since her arrival, Miss St. Clare did not enter the big, rather appalling dining-room alone. The masses of copper-gold hair looked less exaggerated with Hale’s tall figure looming over them. Undeniably the impossible girl was pretty; to-night she was something more. Attention focused upon their table.

“I can’t talk to you here. Will you come out on the lake afterward?” he urged.

“If you think I had better, yes.”

The trust steadied him, recalling his judgment.

“No, you had better not,” he conceded, with a grim glance of distaste around the curious roomful of observers. “Amethyst, how soon can I reach your father––or will you accept me without such a formality? I want to announce our engagement.”

The word painted her cheeks poppy-bright again.

“He may be here any day, now,” she told him. “I must wait for him; if you knew him you would not ask that! Are––are you very sure that you want me? There are so many things about your world that I do not understand. Father never could bear to have me away from him, so I grew up in a little Western town. I was taught things, but that is so different from living them. Are you sure?”

“Do you think it is fair to ask me questions like that before a crowded room and with a waiter at my elbow? I’l answer when I have you alone.”

“You––you said something about my hair––”

“It is the most beautiful hair I ever saw in my life,” said Hale simply.

And he meant it.

There was a rustic summer-house on the edge of the lake. After dinner, the lovers strolled there, through the descending dusk.

Two hours later, Hale left his fiancée in the quiet retreat while he ran back to the hotel in search of a wrap to cover her bare throat and arms. A cool breeze had risen with the rising moon.

He was not absent long, but when he returned another voice sounded in the wistaria-draped place. By the blended gray and silver light he saw that Amethyst was standing, her back to the wall.

Opposite was a stout young gentleman, one of those who had striven to cultivate her acquaintance after Everett Hale had led the way. He possessed much more wealth than intellect, without being immoderately wealthy, but his vanity dwarfed both assets, and that vanity Miss St. Clare had sorely wounded.

“Don’t be so stand-offish, he was advising, heavily playful. “I saw Hale get that kiss this afternoon on the lawn, and what goes for one goes for two. Come on!”

The vengeance that gripped him was cyclonic in unexpectedness. A powerful hand shook him back and forth until the world swam in a dazzle of black and silver, then jerked him violently across the summer-house.

“Next time you speak to my fiancée, watch your tongue,” Hale snarled at his ear. “Apologize, and be quick about it!”

Even in the victim’s giddy confusion, the amazing fact of the fastidious Hale’s engagement to Amethyst St. Clare stood clear.

“I––I didn’t know!” he choked feebly. “Never supposed––”

Hale deliberately heaved the chubby person over the low railing and dropped him into the lake below. There was a shout, a huge splash, and a gurgling sound. Amethyst cried out, terrified.

“It’s twenty feet deep, and he boasts of his swimming,” Hale panted reassurance. “Dearest––”

But she was already in his arms, sobbing and laughing together.

“It stayed on! Oh, Everett, you looked so splendid and dreadful and placid. Even it stayed on!”

“What?” he wondered.

“Your––your monocle.”

“Oh!” recognized Hale, touching his eye-glass. “Quite so. Well––”

“Everett dear, I have seen hundreds of men who could knock others about, but never one who could do it in evening clothes and a monocle without even being ruffled.

A chuckle echoed from the doorway, but the sound was overwhelmed in the floundering, puffing exit of the stout young man from the lake. The one who had laughed remained in the background, an unnoticed and interested observer.

It was some moments before the red-gold head was lifted from Hale’s shoulder.

“I guess I’d better go in,” she suggested. “It’s getting late, and you know they don’t like me, anyhow.”

“It’s a case of liking us,” he quietly reminded her.

The corner of the veranda was occupied by a dozen neglected ladies, suffering from the dearth of masculine society so common to summer resorts. It was with no friendly eyes that they contemplated the advent of the preposterous Miss St. Clare and her desirable escort.

At the foot of the steps Hale paused.

“I have forgotten your cloak!” he exclaimed, with sudden recollection of the garment he had dropped to spring upon Amethyst’s insulter. “Will you excuse me for one moment?”

“Certainly,” she acquiesced, with a secretly dismayed glance at the bevy of doves watching her in the moonlight.

The dismay was not unfounded. As Hale’s figure vanished between the trees, Miss Peggy Arkwright spoke in her drawling accents:

“I beg your pardon, Miss St. Clare––your hair is coming down. You might like to put it in place before Mr. Hale returns.”

Amethyst hastily put up her hand to a slipping mass of puffs, smiling warmly with gratitude for the supposed friendliness.

“Oh thank you!” she exclaimed. “It is falling down.”

“Yes. That would be quite a calamity wouldn’t it?”

Faint amusement rippled through the group. Amethyst stiffened her smile gone.

“Why?” she demanded.

Miss Arkwright rested her satin-smooth head against the back of her chair and covered a yawn with two slim fingers.

“Why indeed?” she agreed. “But men are so fond of romance; we have to preserve it for them by pinning on our coiffures in private.”

It was true that Amethyst St. Clare lacked poise and training. Otherwise, she would never have retorted as she did, when the innuendo sank into her comprension.

Pin it on?” she slowly repeated. “You believe it’s false? You believe––”

Some one laughed. With a swift, passionate movement she raised both hands to her head and dragged the supporting hairpins from the intricate coils, her violet eyes ablaze. Hale arrived at the steps in time to see the fall, as she freed the last restraint by a shake of her small head.

“False!” she gasped, breathless with outraged pride, as the cascade covered her.

Coil after coil, puff after puff, the silken lengths rippled free, cloaking her with copper-gold; a curling, gleaming torrent that reached her knees––the hair of a fairy-tale, of Melisande, Rapunzel, Fair Goldilocks. Preposterous? No, but incredible, bewildering.

“Amethyst!” cried the dazzled Hale, clutching the balustrade.

She turned to him, scarlet with shame and wrath, quailing before sudden dread of his anger at her breach of convention.

“They said it was false,” she appealed piteously, like a child deprecating rebuke. “They said you thought so. Oh!” abruptly stricken with the truth. “You did think so!”

Mechanically Hale fixed his monocle and advanced to the veranda.

“It doesn’t matter what I thought, since you have been good enough to accept me, does it?” he asked coolly. “Ladies, allow me to explain that Miss St. Clare has done me the great honor of consenting to be my wife. Amethyst, let me take you in.”

But another man was before him, risen out of the darkness.

“I reckon, sir, that her father is the best man to take her in just now,” the stranger stated, his masterful, somewhat harsh voice crisp with decision. “No disparagement to you, sir. Glad to know you.”

With a cry of sheer joy Amethyst clung to the arm passed around her. Hale was tall, but this man was taller; an eagle-faced man with short-clipped, curling white hair and biting gray eyes.

“My little girl’s been writing to me every day, and I’ve been looking on a bit this evening,” he added dryly. “There’s considerable we don’t know about Eastern ways, she and I, but we know men. Mr. Hale, I presume. I’m Tom St. Clare, of Amethyst River, Nevada. What?” at the change in the other man’s face. “You didn’t know?”

“No,” confessed Hale, unmistakably honest. “I didn’t know.”

Mr. St. Clare put out his hand.

“Come have a drink,” he invited. There was a long silence on the porch after the three had disappeared within. Into it broke a stout, very wet gentleman, climbing wheezily up the steps.

“Fell out of my canoe,” he explained, heavily nonchalant. “What have you all got to say of our supercilious Hale being engaged to the little blond St. Clare? Did well, didn’t she?”

“So did he,” said Peggy Arkwright composedly. “Miss St. Clare happens to be the only child of Mr. Tom St. Clare of Nevada, my dear Freddie. We are too ready to forget that there are some millionaires not in our set.”

“That St. Clare!” breathed Mrs. Hale from her corner. “Then I suppose those diamonds were real.” Miss Arkwright’s hard little laugh rang out.

“Be honest with ourselves!” she mocked. “We will learn to forgive her the millions and the diamonds––but we will always covet her preposterous hair.”