ous. "Is that the idea?"

"Why, no, Pa." Mrs. Monroe was serving an uninteresting meal on heavy
plates decorated in toneless brown. Soda crackers and sliced bread were
on the table, and a thin slice of butter on a blue china plate. The
teaspoons stood erect in a tumbler of red pressed glass. The younger
girls had old, thin silver napkin rings; their mother's was of
orange-wood with "Souvenir of Santa Cruz" painted on it; and Lydia and
her father used little strips of scalloped and embroidered linen. Lydia
had read of these in a magazine and had made them herself, and as her
daughterly love swept over all the surface ugliness of his character,
she alone among his children sometimes caught a glimpse of her father's
heart. She had an ideal of fatherhood, had gentle, silent, useless
Lydia--formed upon the genial, sunshiny type of parent popular in
books, and she cast a romantic veil over disappointed, selfish,
crossgrained Malcolm Monroe and delighted in little daughterly
attentions to him. She sat next to him at table, and put her own kindly
interpretation upon his moods.

"I confess I don't understand your tactics with that boy!" he said now
irritably.

"Well, he came in after school, and asked could he go out with the
other boys, and I didn't feel you would disapprove, Pa," Mrs. Monroe
said in a worried voice. "Do eat your dinner before it gets all cold!
Lenny'll be here. You'll get one of your bad headaches ... here he is!"

For, to the great relief of his mother and sisters, Leonard Monroe
really did break in from the hall at this point, flinging his cap
toward the hat rack with one hand as he opened the door with the other.
A big, well-developed boy of seventeen was Lenny, dearest of all her
children to his mother, her son and her latest-born, and the secret
hope of his father's heart.

"Say--I'm awful sorry to be so late. Gosh! I ran all the way home. I
thought you'd be on the late train, Pa, and I waited to walk up with
you!" said Lenny, falling upon cooling mutton, boiled potatoes glazed
and sticky, and canned corn.

"Where did you wait?" his father asked, laying one of his endless traps
for an untruth.

"Bonestell's," Lenny answered, perceiving and evading it.

"Young Hawkes drove me up," Malcolm said in a mollified tone.

"Oh?" Lenny's mouth opened innocently. "That's the way I missed you!"

The inevitable ill-temper on their father's part being partly
dissipated by this time, the girls were free to b