me, like you do me, Mrs. Dryfoos. He hasn't got any
rheumatism to speak of; but his parents live in Syracuse, and he's a kind
of an orphan, and we've just adopted him down at the office. When you
going to bring the young ladies down there, Mrs. Mandel, for a champagne
lunch? I will have some hydro-Mela, and Christine it, heigh? How's that
for a little starter? We dropped in at your place a moment, Mrs. March,
and gave the young folks a few pointers about their studies. My goodness!
it does me good to see a boy like that of yours; business, from the word
go; and your girl just scoops my youthful affections. She's a beauty, and
I guess she's good, too. Well, well, what a world it is! Miss Christine,
won't you show Mr. Beaton that seal ring of yours? He knows about such
things, and I brought him here to see it as much as anything. It's an
intaglio I brought from the other side," he explained to Mrs. March, "and
I guess you'll like to look at it. Tried to give it to the Dryfoos
family, and when I couldn't, I sold it to 'em. Bound to see it on Miss
Christine's hand somehow! Hold on! Let him see it where it belongs,
first!"

He arrested the girl in the motion she made to take off the ring, and let
her have the pleasure of showing her hand to the company with the ring on
it. Then he left her to hear the painter's words about it, which he
continued to deliver dissyllabically as he stood with her under a
gas-jet, twisting his elastic figure and bending his head over the ring.

"Well, Mely, child," Fulkerson went on, with an open travesty of her
mother's habitual address, "and how are you getting along? Mrs. Mandel
hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly? Well, that's right. You
know you'd be roaming all over the pasture if she didn't."

The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took him.
on his own ground of privileged character. He brought them all together
in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was over he had
inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee, and had made both
the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in society, and that two
young men had been devoted to them.

"Oh, I think he's just as lovely as he can live!" said Mela, as she stood
a moment with her sister on the scene of her triumph, where the others
had left them after the departure of their guests.

"Who?" asked Christine, deeply. As she glanced down at her ring, her eyes
burned with a soften