f the old man's
urgent invitation to them to remain.

"Do you see the roses they brought me, Dick?" He indicated the bowls and
vases which stood about the room. "I told them you would notice them
directly you came in. Where are your eyes, boy?"

"Do you really blame me for not seeing them, grandfather?" retorted his
grandson audaciously. "But I recognize them now; they are wonderful. I
suppose they have thorns?" His eyes met Roberta's for one daring
instant.

"You wouldn't like them if they didn't," said she.

"Shouldn't I? I'd like to find one with the thorns off; I'd wear it--if
I might. May I have one, grandfather?"

"Of course, Dick. They're mine now to give away, Miss Roberta? Perhaps
you'll put it on for him."

Since the suggestion was made by an old man, who might or might not have
been wholly innocent of taking sides in a game in which his boy was
playing for high stakes, Roberta could do no less than hurriedly to
select a splendid crimson bud without regard to thorns--she was aware of
more than one as she handled it--and fasten it upon a gray coat,
intensely conscious of the momentary nearness of a personality whose
influence upon her was the strangest, most perturbing thing she had ever
experienced.

The flower in place, she could not get away too fast. Rosamond,
understanding now that the air was electric and that her sister wanted
nothing so much as to escape to a safer atmosphere, aided her by taking
the lead and engaging Richard Kendrick in conversation all the way
downstairs to the door and out to the waiting carriage. As they drove
away Rosamond looked back at the figure leaping up the steps, with the
crimson rose showing brilliantly in the June sunshine.

"Rob, he's splendid, simply splendid," she whispered, so that the old
family coachman in front, driving the old family horses, could not hear.
"I don't wonder his grandfather is so proud of him. One can see that
he's going to go right on now and make himself a man worth anybody's
while. He's that now, but he's going to be more."

"I don't see how you can tell so much from hearing him make a few
foolish remarks about some roses!" Roberta's face was carefully averted.

"Oh, it wasn't what he said, it's what he is! It shows in his face. I
never saw purpose come out so in a face as it has in his in the time
that we've known him. Besides, we began by taking him for nothing but a
society man, and we were mistaken in that from the beginning. Steph