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seat and bade him do likewise. "You did see Uncle Amy, didn't you? I saw you talking to him; but you ought to have come earlier while there was a receiving-line ready for you. Now you'll have to look around for everybody; you have to speak to my three aunts and all my uncles and my father." "I'll be glad to," declared Fred; and then realizing the absurdity of his fervor in consenting to speak to the aunts and uncles he laughed. "You're scared," said Phil. "And if you won't tell anybody I'm a little bit scared myself, just because everybody tells me how grown-up I am." The music struck up and a young cavalier--a college senior, who had worshiped Phil since his freshman year--came to say that it was his dance. She told him that she was tired and would have to be excused. He wished to debate the question, but she closed the incident promptly and effectively. "I'm busy talking to Mr. Holton; and I can see you any time, Walter." Walter departed crestfallen; she treated him as though he were still a freshman. He was wearing his first dress-coat and the tallest collar he could buy, and it was humiliating to be called Walter and sent away by a girl who preferred to talk to a rustic-looking person in a cutaway coat and a turnover collar with a four-in-hand tie. Phil carried Fred off for a tour of the rooms, pausing to introduce him to her father and to the three aunts, to whom she said how kind it was of Fred to come; that he was the only person she had personally asked to the party. And it was just like Phil, for years the loyal protector of all the discards among the cats and dogs in town, to choose a clodhopper for special attention. Kirkwood, who had forgotten Fred's existence, greeted him in his pleasant but rather absent way. The torrid Wabash Valley summers of many years had not greatly modified the chill in Kirkwood's New England blood, and the isolation in which he had lived so long had deepened his reserve. The scholarly stamp had not been effaced by his abandonment of the academic life, and many of his fellow-townsmen still addressed him as Professor Kirkwood. His joy to-night lay in Phil's happiness; his heart warmed to the terms of praise in which every one spoke of her. It touched his humor that his daughter was in some degree a public character. Her escapades in childhood and youth had endeared her to the community. In her battles with the aunts public sympathy had been pretty generally with Phil. "O
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