and his name is now only an appalling memory.

In the morning Nancy hurried up to the Norrises' as soon as she could.
She found Mary and her mother in the drawing-room. Mary was playing the
piano while her mother sat in a distant chair, amiably shredding
codfish, a pleasure which she would on no account yield to the kitchen.

As soon as the rush of sisterly greeting was passed, all four--for the
cod could not be left behind--repaired to the sofa in the library; and
after the gaps in their correspondence had been filled, they came to the
party. Mary was to be one of the charade captains and Tom Reynolds the
other. Nancy, who was an inevitable member of the charade, was to be on
Tom's side.

"Tell me," she asked, "is he really as nice as you people make out?"

"Oh yes," replied Mary, "he's one of us."

"He used to scare me. He never would dance with me any more than he had
to, and I always was afraid he would get that terribly bored look I've
seen him get. I think probably he's conceited."

"Oh dear, to hear you girls talk you'd think that a little honest
boredom was the most dreadful thing on earth. Why, your fathers used to
get so bored with us that----"

"Now, Gumgum, you know that isn't sensible," broke in Mary severely--a
regrettable habit which seems increasingly prevalent among our modern
daughters--"unless you people were ninnies."

"That was in Garfield's administration," replied Mrs. Norris absently,
"or possibly a little before, in Hayes's--Rutherford B. Hayes. He did
away with the carpetbaggers and all those dreadful people in the South."
Then, more dreamily still, "His middle name was Birchard."

"I know why you think he's conceited," Mary went on, warming up to the
never-ending pleasure of analysis, "but it's because he's really
diffident. Lots of people I know who people think are snobby are only
just diffident."

"What on earth do you mean by saying that Rutherford Hayes was
diffident? He wasn't a bit. He was a very great philanthropist."

"She's too awful today," exclaimed Mary, "with that smelly old fish and
Rutherford Garfield. Gracious, I'd like to bury the old thing."

"You horrid, ungrateful child, when I'm doing this for your lunch. We're
just old Its, we mothers. I'm going to start an Emancipation Club for
Mothers. The poor old things, they might just as well crawl away into
the bushes like rabbits."

There then followed a tender passage between mother and daughter, which
ended in Ma