me I am
going to assist. I'm going to ask him to supper."

"Edward, are you laughing at me again?"

"For once, my dear, no; not at least on the main line. You'd better
ask that Mr. Heath, too."

"And Eleanor?"

The Judge looked across to the oak tree, where Eleanor was
ostentatiously tying up the brown braids of Teresa Morse. Bertram,
talking athletics with Goodyear, had her under fire of his eyes.

"If any young person was ever capable to make that choice, it is your
niece Eleanor," he said. "It might afford study. Yes, ask her, too."

Mr. Chester and Mr. Heath were delighted; though Mr. Chester said that
he had an engagement for the evening. ("What engagement except with
the cutting-women?" thought Mattie Tiffany.) But Eleanor declined.
Some of the chickens were sick; she was afraid that it might be the
pip; she doubted if Antonio or Maria would attend to it; she would sup
at home. Mrs. Tiffany, anticipating the intention which she saw in
Bertram's eyes, made a quick draft on her tact and asked:

"Mr. Chester, would you mind helping me in with the chairs?"

Seated at the supper table, Bertram Chester expanded. The Judge took
him in hand at once; led him on into twenty channels of introspective
talk. Presently, they were speaking direct to one another, the gulf
that separates youth from age, employer from employed, bridged by
interest on one side and supreme confidence on the other. This
grouping left Mrs. Tiffany free to study Heath. It grew upon her that
she had overlooked him and his needs through her interest in the more
obvious Chester. She noticed with approval his finished table manners.
Mr. Chester, though he understood the proper use of knife and fork and
napkin, paid slight attention to "passing things"; Heath, on the
contrary, was alert always, and especially to her needs. "He had a
careful mother," she thought. Gently, and with a concealed approach,
she led him on to his family and his worldly circumstances. He spoke
freely and simply, and with a curious frank assumption that anything
his people chose to do was right, because they did it. He had come
down to the University from Tacoma; his father kept a wagon repair
shop. His people had gone too heavily into the land boom, and lost
everything.

"I felt that I could work my way through Berkeley or Stanford more
easily than through an Eastern college," he said simply.

"And then I shouldn't be so far away from home. Mother likes to see me
at leas