hey both laughed. Their understanding was perfect. Ever since the
older woman had entered her brother's house, years before, to care for
a motherless child, the bond of sympathy between the two had been of
the strongest, and throughout she had remained the best friend and
counsellor, if only because she was the wisest.

When Dan entered the Howlands' drawing-room all the guests had arrived.
He accomplished this difficult feat, which is considered an art in
fashionable schools, with easy grace and unconsciousness and received
Virginia's welcome courteously.

He wore a well-fitting blue suit of conventional cut and neither his
hands nor his feet seemed to bother him a bit. And yet among the men
of the company he stood out in sharp contrast. Miss Howland marked
this particularly when Oddington presented himself with an air of
good-humored camaraderie,--he, the successful young lawyer, with a
growing reputation as a man about town and the glamour which surrounds
the most popular all-around man at his university still about him; a
man who did well everything he tried to do, and able to give the
impression that the things he could not do were not worth the attempt;
whose every action, every word, every expression was marked with the
undefinable stamp of the metropolis, and the various lessons it
teaches. Merrithew, on the other hand, standing tall and
broad-shouldered, looking about him as he talked, with quick, observant
glances; a face weather-beaten, but not rough, a typical Anglo-Saxon
fighting face, but kindly withal; certainly not truculent. Miss
Howland had met young army and navy officers who had aroused in her
similar impressions; she had, in fact, no difficulty in defining
Merrithew's type. He was of the class which does strong things out of
the beaten track; men who in the process of civilization have retained
some of the wandering or combative or predatory instincts of earlier
ages and have been set apart in the scheme of natural selection to
fight battles, explore countries, kill wild beasts, navigate waters, to
the end that a greater proportion of their fellow men may peaceably
advance the interests of commerce, science, the arts, and, other
affairs of a humdrum world.

Oddington took Miss Howland in. At the last moment her father had
telephoned from the office he would be late and not to wait for him.
This necessitated a hasty rearrangement of the dinner cards; and Mrs.
Van Vleck was further disturbe