CHAPTER 19

Lily and Max exchanged a brief, silent glance.

"Is she from New York?" I asked quickly.

"From Louisville. Our white girlhood was spent together there. Our beautiful white——"

"Did you give Sam a little heart-to-heart talk on the veranda?" Max demanded suddenly.

"Did I?" Lily looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and before we knew it——"

"Don't believe everything you hear, Sam," Max advised me.

I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later, I got up to go home.

They accompanied me to the door, standing side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my car, Lily called out peremptorily, "Wait!

I forgot to ask you something, and it's important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West."

"That's right," Max confirmed kindly. "We heard that you were engaged."

"It's libel. I'm too poor."

"But we heard it," Lily insisted, surprisingly opening up again in a flower-like manner. "We heard it from three people, so it must be true."

Of course, I knew what they were

 referring to, but I wasn't even remotely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come