ll
me, Aunt Euphemia," she repeated, "just who Lawford Tapp is?"

"His father is a manufacturer of cheap candies. He is advertised far
and wide as 'I. Tapp, the Salt Water Taffy King.' Fancy! I presume
you are quite right; they probably were nothing more than clam diggers
originally. The wife and daughters are extremely raw; no other word
expresses it. And that house! Have you seen it close to? There was
never anything quite so awful built outside an architect's nightmare."

"They own Tapp Point? _That_ is Lawford's home? Those girls are his
sisters?" Louise murmured almost breathlessly.

"Whom _did_ you take that young man to be, Louise?"

"A fisherman's son," confessed her niece, in a very small voice. And
at that Aunt Euphemia all but fainted.

But Louise would say nothing more--just then. On the approach of some
of her friends, Mrs. Conroth was forced to put a cap upon her vexation,
and bid her niece good-day as sweetly as though she had never dreamed
of boxing her ears.

Louise climbed the nearest stairs to the summit of the bluff. She felt
she could not meet Lawford at this time, and he was between her and the
moving picture actors.

Within the past few hours several things that had seemed stable in
Louise Grayling's life had been shaken.

She had accepted in the very first of her acquaintanceship with Lawford
Tapp the supposition that his social position was quite inferior to her
own. She was too broadly democratic to hold that as an insurmountable
barrier between them.

Her disapproval of the young man grew out of her belief in his identity
as a mere "hired man" of the wealthy owner of the villa on the Point.
She had considered that a man who was so intelligent and well educated
and at the same time so unambitious was lacking in those attributes of
character necessary to make him a success in life.

His love for the open--for the sea and shore and all that pertained to
them--coincided exactly with Louise's own aspirations. She considered
it all right that her father and herself spent much of their time as
Lawford spent his. Only, daddy-prof often added to the sum-total of
human knowledge by his investigations, and sometimes added to their
financial investments through his work as well.

Until now she had considered Lawford Tapp's tendencies toward living
such an irresponsible existence as all wrong--for him. The rather
exciting information she had just gained changed her mental attit