t to be genuinely alive. Mr. Oliver Crowe."

The house-party was to last a week, except for Ted Billett who would
have to go back after Labor Day--and before eight hours of it were over,
Oliver was watching Ted with grandmotherly interest, a little mordant
jealousy, and humor, that, at times, verged toward the hysterical.
Nancy--and especially the loss of her--had made him sensitive as
a skinless man to the winds and vagaries of other young people in
love--and while Ted could look at and talk with Elinor Piper and think
himself as safe as a turtle under its shell from the observations and
discoveries of the rest of the party he could no more hide himself or
his intentions from Oliver's painful scrutiny than he could have hidden
the fact that he had suddenly turned bright green. So Oliver, a little
with the sense of his own extreme generosity, but sincerely enough
in the main, began to play kind shepherd, confidante, referee
and second-between-the-rounds to Ted's as yet quite unexpressed
strivings--and since most of him was only too willing to busy itself
with anything but reminiscences of Nancy, he began to congratulate
himself shortly that under his entirely unacknowledged guidance things
really seemed to be getting along very well.

And here too his streak of ineradicable humor--that bright plaything
made out of knives that is so fine to juggle with light-handedly until
the hand meets it in its descent a fraction of a second too soon--came
often and singularly to his aid. He could see himself in a property
white beard stretching feeble hands in blessing over a kneeling and
respectful Elinor and Ted. "Bless you my dear, dear children--for
though my own happiness has gone with yester-year, at least I have made
you--find each other--and perhaps, when you sit at evening among the
happy shouts of your posterity--" but here Oliver broke off into a snort
of laughter.

Of course Ted had confided nothing formally as yet--but then, thought
Oliver sourly out of his own experience, he wouldn't; that was the way
you always felt; and Ted had never been a person of easy confidences.
The most he had done had been to take Oliver grimly aside from the dance
they had gone to last night and explain in one ferocious and muffled
sentence delivered half at Oliver and half at a large tree that if Hinky
Selvage didn't stop dancing with Elinor that way he, Ted, would carry
him unobtrusively behind a bush and force him to swallow most of his