his parents when a child, and
had been adopted by an uncle and aunt who, apparently, made no attempt
to disguise the fact that they regarded him as an expensive nuisance.
At twelve he had run away, determined to carve out his own career, "And
I did it," he concluded.

"But how did you manage to do it in the time?" asked Mrs. West.

"I was thirty-seven last fall. I began at twelve. You can do a rare
lot in twenty-five years--if you don't happen to have too many
ancestors hanging around," he added grimly.

"I think you are very wonderful," was Mrs. West's comment, and John
Dene knew she meant it.

"If I'd been in this country," he remarked with a return of his old
self-assertiveness, "I'd probably be driving a street-car, or picking
up cigarette-stubs."

"Why?" enquired Mrs. West, puzzled at the remark.

"You can't jump over a wall when you're wearing leaden soles on your
boots," was the terse rejoinder.

"And haven't you sometimes missed not having a mother?" enquired Mrs.
West gently, tears in her sympathetic eyes at the thought of this
solitary man who had never known the comforts of a home. "She would
have been proud of you."

"Would she?" he enquired simply, as he crumbled his cake and threw it
to a flurry of birds that was hopefully fluttering on the fringe of the
tables.

"A son's success means more to a mother than anything else," said Mrs.
West.

"I seem to have been hustling around most of my time," said John Dene.
"I'm always working when I'm not asleep. Perhaps I haven't felt it as
much----"

He left the sentence uncompleted; but there was a look in his eyes that
was not usually there.

Mrs. West sighed with all a mother's sympathy for a lonely man.

"Do you like birds, Mr. Dene?" asked Dorothy.

"Why, sure," he replied, "I like all animals. That's what I don't
understand about you over here," he continued.

"But we love animals," said Mrs. West.

"I mean stag and fox-hunting." There was a hard note in his voice.
"If I had a place in this country and anyone came around hunting foxes
on my land, there'd be enough trouble to keep the whole place from
going to sleep for the next month."

"What should you do?" enquired Dorothy wickedly.

"Well, if anything had to be killed that day it wouldn't be the fox."

"I'm afraid you wouldn't be very popular with your neighbours," said
Dorothy.

"I don't care a pea-nut whether I'm popular or not," he said grimly;
"but they'd have to sort of