irkwood concretely; it had happened
long ago, before he became attentive to such things; but the young woman
with whom he was now conversing visualized the episode for him. In his
mind there was an element of picturesqueness in that joint page of
Holton-Montgomery history. He wondered whether Phil looked like her
mother. Phil was pretty enough, though in repose she seemed rather
spiritless. She was swinging herself in the swivel chair, carelessly,
and since his reference to the old scandal he saw or imagined that he
saw her manner change from courteous interest to a somewhat frosty
indifference. His pride was pricked by the sense of his blunder. He
flattered himself that in his intercourse with men and women he was
adroit in retrieving errors, and his instinct warned him that the
curtain must not fall upon a scene that left him in discomfiture at the
back of the stage.

"It pleased Ethel and me very much to have an invitation to your party,
Miss Kirkwood. It was nice of you to ask us, and we shall certainly come
over, even if I have to give up a trip to New York I had expected to
make at just that time. Let me see, it's the twentieth, isn't it? Well,
I guess I can make them wait down there. We Western folks don't often
get a chance to make New Yorkers wait."

Phil was disposed to be magnanimous. He undoubtedly wished to be
agreeable; and it was his uncle, a remote person whom she had never
seen, who had decamped with her mother. It was hardly just to hold him
accountable for his uncle's misdeeds. She wondered whether the uncle had
been like this nephew, or whether he was more like William Holton, whom
she had seen frequently all her life. In her encounters with Fred
Holton, she had only vaguely associated him with that other and
indubitably wicked Holton who had eloped with her mother.

She was conscious that some one was stirring in the room overhead, and
she became attentive to the sounds. Her father had asked delay in
disposing of the apparatus of the old photograph gallery; he had wanted
to look the old stuff over, he had said, and he wished also to utilize
the darkroom in developing the pictures he had taken on their last
outing. One of the objects of her call this afternoon had been to urge
him to haste, as Bernstein wanted to move his remodeling shop into the
rooms at once.

"I make it a rule of my life," Holton went on, "to duck when it comes to
other people's mistakes. I make enough of my own without should