t to know socially, as he had never harmed them or their
most distant relatives. In an old glass-fronted, secretary bookcase of
mahogany, the first piece of "parlour furniture" his parents had ever
bought, were the dear books of Petro's boyhood and early youth, and
above, on the gray-papered wall, hung a portrait of mother, which her
son had had painted by an unfashionable artist as a "birthday present
from his affectionate self" at the age of sixteen. An ancient easy
chair and a queer old sofa still had the original, slippery, black
horsehair off which Petro and Ena had slid as children. Petro had
named the sofa "the whale," and the squat chair "the seal." Both
shiny, slippery, black things really did resemble sea monsters, and
had never lost for Petro their mysterious personality.

There were some cushions and a fire screen, the bead-and-wool flowers
of which mother had worked in early married life, and on the floor, in
front of the friendly wood fire which Petro loved, lay a rug which was
also her handiwork It was made of dresses her children had worn when
they were very, very little, and some of her own which Petro could
even now remember. Nobody save he, at Sea Gull Manor, cared for a
grate fire; or if mother would have liked one, instead of a
handwrought bronze radiator half hidden in the wall, she dared not say
so. But she came and sat in Petro's den sometimes, crocheting in the
old easy chair, when he was self indulgent enough to have a fire of
ships' logs. The rose and gold and violet flames of the driftwood lit
up for him the secret way to Dreamland and the country of Romance.
What it did for mother, she did not say; but as her fingers moved,
regularly as the ticking of a clock, her eyes would wander over the
old furniture she had loved and back to the fire, as if she were
trying to call up her own past and her son's future.

This morning Petro was not in a good mood, for he had been reading in
the newspaper an interview with him which he hadn't given. It was all
about the "Start in Life Fund," and sounded as if he were boasting,
not only of the idea, but of the way in which he meant to carry it
out. Nobody likes to be made to appear a conceited bounder when his
intentions are as modest as those of a hermit crab, and a hundred
times more benevolent.

Therefore, when Ena came, using as an excuse a dire need of notepaper,
and stopped to dawdle, lighting one of his cigarettes, Petro felt an
urgent desire to be