attributes, so long had he in his out-of-hand way named her
squidge-nosed, putty-faced, pig-eyed, and so on, that in due course he
had really formed his own image of her.

And now, suddenly confronted by the most amazingly pretty girl he had
ever seen, he managed to snort that she was just what he knew she
was--and in the snorting no one knew better than old man Packard that,
as he could have put it himself, "He lied like a horse-thief!"

Terry had seen him once when she was a very little girl. He had been
pointed out to her by one of her father's cowboys who, for reasons of
his own, heartily hated and a little feared the old man. Since then
the girl's lively imagination had created a most unseemly brute out of
the enemy of her house, a beetle-browed, ugly-mouthed, facially-hideous
being little short of a monstrosity.

And now Terry's fine feminine perception begrudgingly was forced to set
about constructing a new picture. The old man, black-hearted villain
that he was, was the most upstanding, heroic figure of a man that she
had ever seen.

Beside him Doctor Bridges was a spectacle of physical degeneracy while
Guy Little became a grotesque dwarf. The grandfather was much like the
grandson, and--though she vowed to like him the less for it--was in his
statuesque, leonine way quite the handsomest man she had ever looked on.

Perhaps it was at just the same instant that each realized that rather
too great an interest had been permitted to go into a long, searching
look. For Terry suddenly affected a look of supreme contempt while the
old man jerked his eyes away, transferring his regard to the serene Guy
Little.

"You said, Guy Little----"

"Yes, sir, I said it!" Guy Little nodded vigorously. "Them forty
miles in fifty-three minutes. In the dark. An' with tire trouble.
It's a record. The best you ever done it in was fifty-seven minutes.
She beat you four minutes. Her!"

He indicated Terry.

"Doctor Bridges--" began Terry.

"It's a lie!" cried the old man, smashing the table top with a clenched
fist. "I don't care who says it; she couldn't do it! No girl could;
no Temple could. It ain't so!"

"Call me a liar?" cried Terry, a sudden flaming, surging, hot current
in her cheeks, her eyes blazing. "You are a horrid old man. I always
knew you were a horrid old man and you are a lot horrider than I
thought you were. And--you just call me a liar again, Hell-Fire
Packard, and I'll slap your face for