s are quite
wonderful ... rare rugs ... portraits of ancestors. A widow. Here for
her health, and the boy's health; he's never been strong. All she has in
the world ... wrapped up in him. _Very_ Eastern!"--she laughed at the
memory. "She said, 'And from what part of the East do you come, Mrs.
Lorimer?' When I said I was born here in Los Angeles she almost
_gasped_, and then she flushed and said, 'Oh, really? Is it possible?
But I met some people on shipboard, once--the time before last when I
was crossing--who were natives, and they were _quite_ delightful.'"

"The word 'native' intrigues them," said Stephen, drawing off her long,
limp suede gloves and smoothing them. "I daresay she'll be looking for
war whoops and tomahawks. And if it comes to that, we can furnish the
former, especially Sunday night."

"Muzzie, did you meet the boy?" Honor wanted to know.

"Yes. He came in for tea with us. A beautifully mannered boy. Very much
at ease. We must have him here, Honor."

"Yes, Jimsy's already asked him for Sunday night, Muzzie. Jimsy likes
him."

"Well, he may. He has a something ... I don't know what it is, exactly,
but he will be good for all of you."

"We'll be good for him, too," said her daughter, calmly. "It must be
fearfully dull for him, not knowing any one, and being lame."

He came to supper, a trim young glass of fashion, and it was he, the
stranger, who was entirely at his ease, and the "bunch," the gay,
accustomed bunch, which was a little shy and constrained. Jimsy stood
sponsor for him and Honor was an earnest hostess. He said he enjoyed
himself; certainly he made himself gently agreeable to Mrs. Lorimer, to
the girls. Honor's stepfather observed him with his undying curiosity.
He was a plain boy with a look of past pain in his colorless face, a
shadowed bitterness in his eyes, a droop at the corners of his mouth
when he was not speaking. For all his two motor cars and his rare old
rugs and the portraits of ancestors and his idolized only sonship, life
had clearly withheld from him the things he had wanted most. There was a
baffled imperiousness about him, Stephen decided.

"A clever youngster," he told his wife, watching him from across the
room. "Brains. But I don't like him."

"Stephen! Why not?"

He shook his head. "I don't know yet. But I know. I had a curious sense,
as he came limping into the room to-night, of '_Enter the villain_.'"

"My dear,--that poor, frail boy, with his lovely, gent