f he was making it up as he
went along." He had the grace to grin at himself over that admission,
however. "Oh, well," he concluded, "Paula's all right anyhow. I think
she's--wonderful, myself. Only poor old dad! He is a peach, Mary. It's
funny how differently I remember him. He acted like one real sport
to-night."

"Afterward, you mean." Mary, it seemed, would not have characterized her
father's behavior earlier in the evening in just that way. "Tell me all
about it. Only reach me a cigarette first."

He obeyed the latter injunction with an air of protest. "It's the only
thing you do that I wish you didn't," he said.

"Why? Do you think it's bad for me?"

He wouldn't commit himself by answering that. The retort it offered her
was obvious. "It doesn't seem like you," he explained.

"Very well," she said, taking a light from his match, "then I shall go on
just to keep you reminded that I'm not plaster of Paris. I like to have
somebody around who doesn't think that."

"Father doesn't," Rush asserted, and got so eager a look of inquiry from
her that he regretted having nothing very substantial to satisfy it
with. "Oh, down there in the hall," he said, "after everybody but March
and the Frenchman had gone. Aunt Lucile began fussing about you. She was
rather up in the air, anyway. She'd done the nonchalant, all
right,--overdone it a bit in fact--as long as there was any one around
to play up to. But when we had got rid of the Novellis--they were the
last--she did a balloon ascension. She had a fit or two in general and
then came round to wondering about you. Wanted to know when we'd last
seen you--what _could_ have happened to you,--that sort of thing. I'd
been having a little talk with Graham so I supposed I knew. But of
course I said nothing about that."

He was looking rather fixedly away from her and so missed her frown of
incomprehension. "Well, but father?" she asked.

It had been coming over him that what his father had said was not just
what he wanted to report to Mary. Not while she felt about him as she
had confessed, down there in New York, she did. But he had let himself
in for it.

"Why, it wasn't much," he said; "just that nothing could have happened to
you; that you wouldn't 'fall off anything and break.' What you said about
plaster of Paris made me think of it. He was only trying to get Aunt
Lucile quieted down."

"While he had Paula on his mind, he didn't want to be bothered about me.
That's nat