priate to hold the dance here? The ground-floor rooms are in order,
and if the young people would put up with it, it would be a great
pleasure to me, I assure you."

"Oh!" breathed Shirley. "That would be too wonderful!"

The major seized his hand and shook it heartily. "I can answer for the
committee," he said. "They'll jump at it. Why, sah, the new generation
has never set eyes inside the house. It's a golden legend to them."

"Then I'll go ahead with arrangements."

Shirley's eyes were overrunning the cropped lawn, which now showed a
clear smooth slope between the arching trees. "It was lovely in its
ruin," she said, "but it was pathetic, too. Unc' Jefferson used to
say 'De ol' place look lak et ben griebin' etse'f ter deff wid
lonesomeness.' Somehow, now it looks glad. Just hear that small
citizen!"

A red squirrel sat up in a tree-crotch, his paws tucked into his furry
breast, barking angrily at them. "He's shocked at the house-cleaning,"
she said; "a sign he's a bachelor."

"So am I," said Valiant.

"Maybe he's older than you," she countered; "and sot in his ways."

"I accept him as a warning," he said, and she laughed with him.

He led them around the house and down the terraces of the formal garden,
and here the major's encomiums broke forth again. "You are going to take
us old folks back, sah," he said with real feeling. "This gyarden in its
original lines was unique. It had a piquancy and a picturesqueness that,
thank God, are to be restored! One can understand the owner of an estate
like this having no desire to spend his life philandering abroad. We all
hope, sah, that you will recur to the habit of your ancestors, and count
Damory Court home."

Valiant smiled slowly. "I don't dream of anything else," he said. "My
life, as I map it out, seems to begin here. The rest doesn't count--only
the years when I was little and had my father."

The major carefully adjusted his eye-glasses. His head was turned away.
"Ah, yes," he said.

"The last twenty years," continued the other, "from my present
view-point, are valuable mainly for contrast."

"As a consistent regimen of _pate de foie gras_," said Shirley
quizzically, "makes one value bread and butter?"

He shook his head at her. "As starvation makes one appreciate plenty.
The next twenty years are to be here. But they hold side-trips, too. Now
and then there's a jaunt back to the city."

"Contrast again?" she asked interestedly.

"Yes and no. Yes,