to the door and looked back
alluringly. "You are a PERFECT dear."

And this after seven years, I marvelled, till she was back again, timid
and apologetic.

"I--I gave him one of your white shirts. He wore a cheap horrid cotton
thing, and I knew it would look ridiculous. And then his shoes were so
slipshod, I let him have a pair of yours, the old ones with the narrow
caps--"

"Old ones!"

"Well, they pinched horribly, and you know they did."

It was ever thus the Sunflower vindicated things.

And so Leith Clay-Randolph came to Idlewild to stay, how long I did
not dream. Nor did I dream how often he was to come, for he was like an
erratic comet. Fresh he would arrive, and cleanly clad, from grand folk
who were his friends as I was his friend, and again, weary and worn,
he would creep up the brier-rose path from the Montanas or Mexico. And
without a word, when his wanderlust gripped him, he was off and away
into that great mysterious underworld he called "The Road."

"I could not bring myself to leave until I had thanked you, you of the
open hand and heart," he said, on the night he donned my good black
suit.

And I confess I was startled when I glanced over the top of my paper and
saw a lofty-browed and eminently respectable-looking gentleman, boldly
and carelessly at ease. The Sunflower was right. He must have known
better days for the black suit and white shirt to have effected such a
transformation. Involuntarily I rose to my feet, prompted to meet him on
equal ground. And then it was that the Clay-Randolph glamour descended
upon me. He slept at Idlewild that night, and the next night, and for
many nights. And he was a man to love. The Son of Anak, otherwise Rufus
the Blue-Eyed, and also plebeianly known as Tots, rioted with him from
brier-rose path to farthest orchard, scalped him in the haymow with
barbaric yells, and once, with pharisaic zeal, was near to crucifying
him under the attic roof beams. The Sunflower would have loved him
for the Son of Anak's sake, had she not loved him for his own. As for
myself, let the Sunflower tell, in the times he elected to be gone,
of how often I wondered when Leith would come back again, Leith the
Lovable. Yet he was a man of whom we knew nothing. Beyond the fact that
he was Kentucky-born, his past was a blank. He never spoke of it. And
he was a man who prided himself upon his utter divorce of reason from
emotion. To him the world spelled itself out in problems. I char