gree of equanimity. In the back part
of his mind, however, he held the fighting ultimatum in suspense. In
the course of the evening he would make his opportunity and have it out,
once for all, with the master plotter. So much he determined while he
was dressing for dinner. But the course of events is sometimes a most
unmalleable thing, as he was presently to learn.

At the dinner-table it was the professor who monopolized the
conversation, holding forth learnedly and dictatorially upon matters
pertaining solely to the Pliocene age, and never once suffering the talk
to approach nearer than several million years to the twentieth century.
And at the dispersal--only there was no dispersal--the senator took his
turn, leading the way to the great wainscoted living-room and persuading
Patricia to go to the piano.

The young man with the fighting determination in the back part of his
brain bided his time. He was willing enough to listen to Grieg and
Brahms as they were interpreted by Patricia, but the greater matter was
still outweighing the lesser. Further along, when Miss Anners had played
herself out, Blount tried to break the obstructing combination. But, in
spite of his efforts, the talk drifted back to the dinosaurs and the
pterodactyls, and when he finally went away to smoke, he did it alone.

The Wartrace Hall den was an annex to the living-room, and through the
bamboo _portieres_ he could hear the animated hum of the prehistoric
discussion, in which Patricia had now joined as a loyal daughter should.
Hoping against hope that the professor would some time go to bed, and
that his father would come to the den for his bedtime whiff at the
long-stemmed pipe, Blount smoked and waited. But when his patience was
finally rewarded, it was not the Honorable Senator who drew the bamboo
_portieres_ aside and entered the cosey smoking-room. It was Patricia,
and she was alone.

"I thought perhaps I should find you here," she said, taking the easy
chair at the opposite corner of the fireplace where a tiny wood fire was
blazing in deference to the chill of the approaching autumn. "Did we
bore you to death with the Pliocenes?"

"Not quite," he admitted grudgingly. "But since I hadn't remembered to
have myself born six or seven million years ago, I can't somehow seem to
galvanize a very active interest in the dead-and-gone periods."

"Nor I," she confessed frankly, "though for daddy's sake I do try to.
But for us who are living to-