e Mr. Doyle."

"I detest him."

"But you don't know him, do you?"

"I know he is stirring up all sorts of trouble for us. Lily, I want you
to promise not to go back there."

There was a little silence. A small feeling of rebellion was rising in
the girl's heart.

"I don't see why. She is my own aunt."

"Will you promise?"

"Please don't ask me, mother. I--oh, don't you understand? It is
interesting there, that's all. It isn't wrong to go. And the moment you
forbid it you make me want to go back."

"Were there any other people there to dinner?" Grace asked, with sudden
suspicion.

"Only one man. A lawyer named Akers."

The name meant nothing to Grace Cardew.

"A young man?"

"Not very young. In his thirties, I should think," Lily hesitated again.
She had meant to tell her mother of the engagement for the next day, but
Grace's attitude made it difficult. To be absolutely forbidden to meet
Louis Akers at the gallery, and to be able to give no reason beyond the
fact that she had met him at the Doyle house, seemed absurd.

"A gentleman?"

"I hardly know," Lily said frankly. "In your sense of the word, perhaps
not, mother. But he is very clever."

Grace Cardew sighed and picked up her book. She never retired until
Howard came in. And Lily went upstairs, uneasy and a little defiant.
She must live her own life, somehow; have her own friends; think her own
thoughts. The quiet tyranny of the family was again closing down on
her. It would squeeze her dry, in the end, as it had her mother and Aunt
Elinor.

She stood for a time by her window, looking out at the city. Behind her
was her warm, luxurious room, her deep, soft bed. Yet all through
the city there were those who did not sleep warm and soft. Close by,
perhaps, in that deteriorated neighborhood, there were children that
very night going to bed hungry.

Because things had always been like that, should they always be so?
Wasn't Mr. Doyle right, after all? Only he went very far. You couldn't,
for instance, take from a man the thing he had earned. What about the
people who did not try to earn?

She rather thought she would be clearer about it if she talked to Willy
Cameron.

She went to bed at last, a troubled young thing in a soft white
night-gown, passionately in revolt against the injustice which gave to
her so much and to others so little. And against that quiet domestic
tyranny which was forcing her to her first deceit.

Yet the visit to the gal