utocratic little Lady Donnyfare.

Lady Donnyfare! She would be "your ladyship!" Nineteen years old, and
welcomed to the ancestral mansion as her little ladyship!

Norma set the dinner table for three, with jerks and slams that slightly
relieved her boiling heart. She got the napkins from the sideboard
drawer, and reached for the hand-painted china sugar bowl that was part
of a set that Aunt Kate had won at a fair. She set the blue tile that
she had given Aunt Kate on a long-ago Christmas where the brown Rebecca
teapot would stand, and cut a square slice of butter from the end of the
new pound for the blue glass dish. And all the time her heart was
bursting with grief and discontent, and she was beginning to realize for
the first time the irrevocable quality of the step she had taken, and
just how completely it had shut her off from the life for which she
thirsted.

Wolf came in, hungry, dirty, radiantly happy, with a quick kiss for his
mother and an embrace for his wife into which her slender figure and
cloudy brown head almost disappeared. Lord, he was starving; and Lord,
he was dead; and Lord, it was good to get home, said Wolf, his
satisfaction with life too great to leave room for any suspicion of his
wife's entire sympathy.

She told them, over the meal, of Mary and Katrina, in whom their
interest was of a simple and amazed quality that Norma resented, and of
Chris's prospect, which did awaken some comment from Mrs. Sheridan.
They were a clever family, she said.

But now Wolf, bursting with long suppression, suddenly took the floor
with his own great news. Voorhies, the fifty-year-old manager of the
California plant, had been drifting about the Newark factory for several
days, and Wolf had talked with him respectfully, as a man of
twenty-five, whose income is three thousand a year, may talk to a
six-thousand-dollar manager, and to-day Voorhies, and Jim Palmer, the
Newark manager, and Paul Stromberg, the vice-president, had taken Wolf
to lunch with them, apparently casually, apparently from mere
friendliness. But Voorhies had asked him if he had ever seen the West;
and Stromberg had said that he understood Sheridan's family consisted
merely of a young wife, and Palmer had chanced to drop carelessly the
fact that Mr. Voorhies was not going back to California----!

That was all. But it was enough to send Wolf back to his work with his
head spinning. California--and a managership of a mine--and six
thousand! It