f there
were any possible chance of his being invited.

But Judge Gray offered no suggestion of the sort, and Richard made up
his mind that the Christmas Eve dance would be a strictly family affair.
"Probably the country relatives are a queer lot," he decided, "and the
Grays don't care to show them off. Still--that's not like them, either.
It's certainly like them to do such an eccentric thing as to get their
cousins all here and try to give them a good time. I should like to see
it. I should!"

He found his thoughts wandering many times during the morning's work to
the image of Roberta dancing with the old uncle from the country. He had
never met her at any of the society dances which were now and then
honoured by his presence. Unquestionably the Grays moved in a circle
with which he was not familiar--a circle made up of people distinguished
rather for their good birth and the things which they had done than for
their wealth. Nobody in the city stood upon a higher social level than
the Grays, but they lived in a world in which the gay and fashionable
set Richard knew were totally unknown and unhonoured.

The more he thought about it the more he wished that, if only for a
week, he were at least a sixteenth cousin of the Gray family, that he
might be present at that Christmas party. But during the week chance did
not even throw him in the way of meeting the various members of the
family proper, and when Saturday night came he had discovered no
prospect of attaining his wish. He knew that the guests were to arrive
on the following Monday. Christmas Day was on Saturday; the night of the
party then would be Friday night. And the Judge, in taking leave of him,
did not even mention again his wish that Richard might see the guests
together.

He was coming out of the library, on his way to the hall door, hope
having died hard and his spirits being correspondingly depressed, when
Fate at last intervened in his behalf. Fate took the form of young Mrs.
Stephen Gray, descending the stairs with a two-year-old child in her
arms, such a rosy, brown-eyed cherub of a child that an older and more
hardened bachelor than Richard Kendrick need not have been suspected of
dissimulation if he had stopped short in his course as Richard did, to
admire and wonder.

"Is that a real, live boy?" cried the young man softly. "Or have you
stolen him out of a frame somewhere?"

Mrs. Stephen stood still, smiling, on the bottom stair, and Richard