y," he begged gently.

"I was born into that crowd, and I still belong to it, because all of
them are my real friends, but get this into your thick Scotch-Irish
head, Mr. Dundee--I'm working because I have to, and--and because I love
it, too, and because I want to earn enough before I'm many years older
to give Mother some of the things she's missing so dreadfully
since--since my father failed and--and ran away."

"Ran away?" Dundee echoed incredulously. How could any man desert a
daughter like this!

"Yes! Ran away!" she repeated fiercely. "I might as well tell you
myself. Plenty of others will be willing to, as soon as they know you
are--my friend.... As I told you, my father"--her voice broke--"my
father went bankrupt, but before the courts knew it he had sent some
securities to a--to a _woman_ in New York, and when he--left us, he went
to her, because he left Mother a note saying so. His defrauded creditors
here have tried to--to catch him, but they haven't--yet--"

Very gently Bonnie Dundee took the small hand that was distractedly
rumpling the brown waves which swept back from the widow's-peak. It lay
fluttering in his bigger palm for a moment, then snatched itself away.

"I won't have you feeling sorry for me!" she cried angrily.

"Who owns your--the Primrose Meadows house now?--Mrs. Selim?" he asked.

"The 'lovely Nita'?" Her voice was scornful. "No. She rents it from
Judge Hugo Marshall--or is supposed to pay him rent," she added with a
trace of malice. "Hugo is an old darling, but he is fearfully weak where
pretty women are concerned. Nita Selim had known Hugo in New
York--somehow--and as soon as Lois--Mrs. Dunlap, I mean--had got Nita
off the train, the stranger in our midst hied herself to Hugo's office
and he's been tagging after her ever since.... Though most of the men in
our crowd are as bad as or worse than poor old Hugo. How Karen keeps on
looking so blissfully happy--"

"Karen?" Dundee interrupted.

"Mrs. Hugo Marshall," she explained impatiently. "Karen Plummer made her
debut a year ago this last winter--a darling of a girl. Judge
Marshall--retired judge, you know--had been proposing to the prettiest
girl in each season's crop of debs for the last twenty years, and Hugo
must have been the most nonplussed 'perennial bachelor' who ever led a
grand march when Karen snapped him up.... Loved him--actually! And it
seems to have worked out marvelously.... A baby boy three months old,"
she conclude