, "if you want to cut a man to the quick, insist on
thinking him that which he has never had any love for being, and which
he has grown to detest the thought of. But perhaps it's a salutary sort
of surgery, for--by the powers! if I can't make you think differently of
me it won't be for lack of will. So--thank you for being hard on me,
thank you for everything. Good-night!"

As she looked at him march away with his head up, her hand was aching
with the force of the almost brutally hard grip he had given it with
that last speech. Her final glimpse of him showed him with a tinge of
the angry red still lingering on his cheek, and a peculiar set to his
finely cut mouth which she had never noticed there before. But, in spite
of this, anything more courtly than his leave-taking of her mother and
her Aunt Ruth she had never seen from one of the young men of the day.

CHAPTER IX

MR. KENDRICK ENTERTAINS

On their way downstairs, Matthew Kendrick and his grandson, escorted by
Louis Gray, encountered a small company of people apparently just
arrived from a train. Louis stopped for a moment to greet them, turned
them over to his brother Stephen, whom he signalled from a stair-landing
above, and went on down to the entrance-hall with the Kendricks.

"Too bad they're late for the party," he observed. "They had written
they couldn't come, I believe. Mother will have to do a bit of figuring
to dispose of them. But the more the merrier under this roof, every
time."

"It's rather late to be putting people up for the night," Richard
observed. "Your mother will be sending some of them to a hotel, I
imagine. Couldn't we"--he glanced at his grandfather--"have the pleasure
of taking them in our car? or of sending it back for them, if there are
too many?"

"Thank you, but I've no doubt mother can arrange--" Louis Gray began,
when old Matthew Kendrick interrupted him:

"We can do better than that, Dick," said he. He turned to Louis. "We
will wait," said he, "while you present my compliments to your mother
and say that it will give me great satisfaction if she will allow me to
entertain an overflow party of her guests."

Hardly able to believe his ears, Richard stared at his grandfather. What
had come over him, who had lived in such seclusion for so many years,
that he should be offering hospitality at midnight to total strangers?
He smiled to himself. But the next moment a thought struck him.

"Grandfather," he said hurriedl