ttle bungalow home. There was little that he could do to
help, as Mrs. Gallant had arranged everything and spent most of the time
in the kitchen preparing the dinner which he saw was to be one of the
repasts his father had so often termed a "feast fit for a king."

"My boy is truly a man now," she said to him. "Do you realize that this
is the first time you have ever invited a girl to your home?"

He laughed as he took her in his arms to pet her.

"Mother, dearest," he said, "I know what you have been thinking, but you
are wrong. Consuello is a wonderful girl and sometimes I cannot
understand why she has been so kind to me. She is only a friend,
dearest, and you mustn't think that your boy is in love with her or that
she is in love with him."

Mrs. Gallant smiled up to him.

"You think a lot of her," she said.

"I do," he admitted. "She has been so very kind. She believes I am
helping someone she seems really to care for."

"Yes, yes, I understand," Mrs. Gallant said. "You run along now and let
me finish what I have to do."

In the living room he picked up the volume of "David Copperfield" he had
been reading through for the first time since his father's death. Musing
as he turned the pages he thought how thankful he was to his father for
having made reading interesting to him. He remembered that the books his
father had read to him and had given him to read, books that crammed
the small bookcase near the fireplace and filled every shelf and table
in the room, were the very best--Dickens, Thackeray, Washington Irving,
Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Addison, and of the later writers, Kipling,
O. Henry, Anatole France, Mark Twain, Barrie.

"If I ever have a boy I will teach him to read as my father taught me,"
he said to himself.

Consuello arrived a few minutes before three. He saw through the window
the machine in which they had ridden to her father's ranch the previous
Sunday draw up to the curb outside. He watched her descend from the
tonneau, speak to the chauffeur, who touched his cap, and turn toward
the walk leading to the house. She wore the same dainty white dress she
wore each time he had seen her and a white, summery, wide-brimmed hat.

He went out to meet her.

"You see," she said, "I'm not one of those who believe in being
fashionably late. What a pretty little place you have."

His mother met them at the door. She had doffed her kitchen apron and
her face was slightly flushed--from the heat of th