e child, relievedly. "_You_ explain it to
her." She went contentedly away and a moment later they heard her robust
young voice lifted on the lawn next door,--"Jim-_zee_! Oh, Jimsy!
Come-mawn-_out_!"

"You see?" Mrs. Lorimer wanted rather inaccurately to know. "That's what
we've got to stop, Stephen."

He smiled. "But--as your eldest offspring just now inquired--why?"

"_Why?_" She lifted her hands and let them fall into her lap again, palm
upward, and regarded him in gentle exasperation. "Stephen, you know,
really, sometimes I feel that you are not a bit of help to me with the
children."

"Sometimes you do, I daresay," he granted her, serenely, "but most of
the time you must be simply starry-eyed with gratitude over the
brilliant way I manage them. Come along over here and we'll talk it
over!" He patted the place beside him on the couch.

"You mean," said his wife a little sulkily, going, nevertheless, "that
you'll talk me over!"

"That is my secret hope," said Stephen Lorimer.

It was all quite true. He did manage her children and their
children--there were three of each--with astonishing ease and success.
They amused him, and adored him. He understood them utterly. Honor was
seven when her own father died and nine when her mother married again.
Stephen Lorimer would never forget her first inspection of him.
Nursemaids had done their worst on the subject of stepfathers; fairy
tales had presented the pattern. He knew exactly what was going on in
her mind, and--quite as earnestly beneath his persiflage as he had set
himself to woo the widow--he set himself to win her daughter. It was a
matter of moments only before he saw the color coming back into her
square little face and the horror seeping out of her eyes. It was a
matter of days only until she sought him out and told him, in her
mother's presence, that she believed she liked him better than her first
father.

"Honor, _dear_! You--you mustn't, really----" Mildred Lorimer insisted
with herself on being shocked.

"Don't _you_, Muzzie? Don't you like him better?" the child wanted
persistently to know. "He was very nice, of course; I did like him
awfully. But he was always 'way off Down Town ... at The Office. We
didn't have any fun with him. Stepper's always home. I'm glad we married
a newspaper one this time."

"Stephen, that dreadful name.... What will people think?"

Her new husband didn't in the least care. He and Honor had gravely
considered on that