name was sure to come up.

"It's a good thing Charlie isn't here," they'd chuckle. "We couldn't
fool him this easy; he'd spot it; he'd tear us to pieces with his
tongue."

His enemies were more honest; they remembered and appreciated him as an
antagonist.

The others, save for the epigrammatic quotations already mentioned,
were more immediately concerned with his daughter. She had been proud
of her father--proud! She had never belittled him with hidden pity,
not even on that night when she surprised him, all in evening black and
white, immaculate and wasted, before a mirror which hung over the
buffet in the dining-room. He was holding a goblet in an uplifted
hand, the skin cruelly taut, though he neither swayed nor stammered.

"Your damnation, my friend," she heard him say. "Your deep damnation."

And he drank it to his reflection.

The friends were immediately concerned with the daughter. And her
pride! They didn't say so, not aloud, but they thought to see it break
now. And the day that Ostermoor--Young Ostermoor was his title, though
his given name was Howard Davenport--broke his never announced and
merely tacitly accepted engagement to her they knew great joy. But she
robbed them of half their triumph. In public she never dropped her
chin. And only Ostermoor and she knew the shame of that private
conversation by which they were unplighted.

"You must see my predicament." So spoke Ostermoor. "I'm dependent on
the old man. If he cuts me off, and he says he will if--"

Even callow young Ostermoor, hair slick and scented, a thick-limbed,
small-town Brummel confident in his best-clothes smartness, had not had
quite the courage to tell her to her uplifted, flushed face what his
father had shouted:--That he'd have no blood of his crossed with hers;
that it was dangerous blood--tainted--wild.

"He says," he finished lamely instead, "it's better to wait."

Yet how easily she read his lameness, and estimated his father's words.
Dangerous blood--tainted? Ostermoor had feared her tongue; the women
in his household talked shrilly and long upon far less provocation.
But she only sat and seemed to smile.

"I see," was all she said.

And while she smiled, her cheeks hot, his eyes had crept over her. Her
slenderness was rounded, her slimness soft and full. A girl, it came
upon him, for whom a man's arms might still yearn in spite of himself.

"This--this needn't mean any real break between us," he ho