t, and they might as well have the parting over. Honor was very
steady about it. "Good-by, Stepper. I'll write you at once, and you'll
keep us posted about Mr. King?" She stood on the observation platform,
waving to him, gallantly smiling, and he managed his own whimsical grin
until her train curved out of sight. One in a thousand, his Top Step.
How she had added to the livableness of life for him since the day she
had gravely informed her mother that she believed she liked him better
than her own father, that busy gentleman who had stayed so largely Down
Town at The Office! Stephen Lorimer was too intensely and healthily
interested in the world he was living in to indulge in pallid curiosity
about the one beyond, but now his mind entertained a brief wonder ...
did he know, that long dead father of Honor Carmody, about this glorious
girl of his? Did he see her now, setting forth on this quest; this
pilgrimage to her True Love, as frankly and freely as she would have
gone to nurse him in sickness? He grinned and gave himself a shake as he
went back to the machine,--he had lost too much sleep lately. He would
turn in for a nap before luncheon; Mildred would not be out of her
Madame's deft hands until noon.

The family of Menendez y Garci-a beamed upon Honor with shy cordiality.
Senor Menendez was a dapper little gentleman, got up with exquisite care
from the perfect flower on his lapel to his small cloth-topped patent
leather shoes, but his wife was older and larger and had a tiny, stern
mustache which made her seem the more male and dominant figure of the
two. Mariquita, the girl, was all father, and she had been a year in a
Los Angeles convent. The mother wore rich but dowdy black and an
impossible headgear, a rather hawklike affair which appeared to have
alighted by mistake on the piles of dusky hair where it was shakily
balancing itself, but Mariquita's narrow blue serge was entirely modish,
and her tan pumps, and sheer amber silk hose, and her impudent hat. The
Senor spent a large portion of his time in the smoker and the Senora
bent over a worn prayer book or murmured under her breath as her fingers
slipped over the beads in her lap, but the girl chattered unceasingly.
Her English was fluent but she had kept an intriguing accent.

"Ees he not beautiful, Mees Carmody, my Papa?" She pushed the accent
forward to the first syllable. "And my poor _Madrecita_ of a homely to
chill the blood? _But_ a saint, my mawther. Me,