nly I prefer
to look at it. You are a slattern and a jay-bird and a joy forever. And
besides, the first Stapleton seems to have blundered somehow into the
House of Burgesses, so that entitles me to be a Colonial Dame on my
father's side, too, doesn't it, Olaf?"

The colonel laughed. "Madam Vanity!" said he, "I repeat that to be
descended of a line of czars or from a house of emperors is, at the
worst, an empty braggartism, or, at best--upon the plea of heredity--a
handy palliation for iniquity; and to be descended of sturdy and honest
and clean-blooded folk is beyond doubt preferable, since upon quite
similar grounds it entitles one to hope that even now, 'when their
generation is gone, when their play is over, when their panorama is
withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world,' there may yet survive
of them 'some few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have
retained some happy stamp from the disposition of their parents.'"

Patricia--with eyes widened in admiration at his rhetoric,--had turned
an enticing shade of pink.

"I am glad of that," she said.

She snuggled so close he could not see her face now. She was to all
appearances attempting to twist the top-button from his coat.

"I am very glad that it entitles one to hope--about the
children--Because--"

The colonel lifted her a little from him. He did not say anything. But
he was regarding her half in wonder and one-half in worship.

She, too, was silent. Presently she nodded.

He kissed her as one does a very holy relic.

It was a moment to look back upon always. There was no period in Rudolph
Musgrave's life when he could not look back upon this instant and exult
because it had been his.

* * * * *

Only, Patricia found out afterward, with an inexplicable disappointment,
that her husband had not been talking extempore, but was freely quoting
his "Compiler's Foreword" just as it figured in the printed book.

One judges this posturing, so inevitable of detection, to have been as
significant of much in Rudolph Musgrave as was the fact of its belated
discovery characteristic of Patricia.

Yet she had read this book about her family from purely normal motives:
first, to make certain how old her various cousins were; secondly, to
gloat over any traces of distinction such as her ancestry afforded;
thirdly, to note with what exaggerated importance the text seemed to
accredit those relatives she did not est