and showed his little wizened face
rather paler than usual. "That's a combination that would kill _me_, and
your mother not well yet--still, many folks, many tastes."

He looked at Lydia penetratingly. She had taken a chair before the
soft-coal fire and was staring at it rather moodily. "Well, Lydia, my
dear, and how does Endbury strike you now? Speaking of many tastes, what
are yours going to be like, I wonder?"

"I wonder," she repeated absently.

"Well, at least you know whether the young man who called on you last
night is to your taste?"

Lydia turned her face away and made a nervous gesture. "Oh, don't,
Godfather!"

"Very well, I won't," he said cheerfully, turning to his books with the
instinct of one who knows his womankind.

There was a long silence, broken only by the purring of the coal. Then
Lydia gave a laugh and went to sit on the arm of his chair. "Of course
that was what I came to see you about," she admitted, her sensitive lips
quivering into a smile that was not light-hearted; "but now I'm here I
find I haven't anything to say. Perhaps you'd better give me a pink pill
and send me home to forget all about everything."

Dr. Melton took her fingers and held them closely in his thin, sinewy
hands. "Oh, if I could--if I only could do something for you!" He
searched her face anxiously. "What did young Hollister say that makes
you so troubled?"

She sat down on the edge of his writing-table and reflected. "It wasn't
anything he _said_," she admitted. "He was all right, I guess. Father
had scared the life out of me before he came, by sort of taking it for
granted--Oh, you know--the silly way people do--"

"Yes."

"Well, Paul was as nice as could be about that, so far as words go-- He
didn't say a thing embarrassing or--or hard to answer, but he let me
_see_--all the same! He kept saying what an immense help I'd be to an
ambitious man. He said he didn't see why I shouldn't grow into the
leader of Endbury society, like the Mrs. Hollister, his aunt, that he
and his sister live with, you know."

"I suppose he's right," conceded the doctor, reluctantly.

"Well, while he was talking about it, it seemed all very well--you know
the way he goes at things--how he makes you feel as though he were a
locomotive going sixty miles an hour and you were inside the engine cab,
holding on for dear life?"

Dr. Melton shook his head. "Paul has given me a great variety of
sensations," he admitted, "but I can't say