eumatism to speak of; but his parents live in Syracuse,
and he's a kind of an orphan, and we've just adopted him down at the
office. When you going to bring the young ladies down there, Mrs.
Mandel, for a champagne lunch? I will have some hydro-Mela, and
Christine it, heigh? How's that for a little starter? We dropped in at
your place a moment, Mrs. March, and gave the young folks a few pointers
about their studies. My goodness! it does me good to see a boy like
that of yours; business, from the word go; and your girl just scoops my
youthful affections. She's a beauty, and I guess she's good, too. Well,
well, what a world it is! Miss Christine, won't you show Mr. Beaton that
seal ring of yours? He knows about such things, and I brought him here
to see it as much as anything. It's an intaglio I brought from the other
side," he explained to Mrs. March, "and I guess you'll like to look at
it. Tried to give it to the Dryfoos family, and when I couldn't, I sold
it to 'em. Bound to see it on Miss Christine's hand somehow! Hold on!
Let him see it where it belongs, first!"

He arrested the girl in the motion she made to take off the ring, and
let her have the pleasure of showing her hand to the company with the
ring on it. Then he left her to hear the painter's words about it, which
he continued to deliver dissyllabically as he stood with her under a
gas-jet, twisting his elastic figure and bending his head over the ring.

"Well, Mely, child," Fulkerson went on, with an open travesty of her
mother's habitual address, "and how are you getting along? Mrs. Mandel
hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly? Well, that's right. You
know you'd be roaming all over the pasture if she didn't."

The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took
him on his own ground of privileged character. He brought them all
together in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was
over he had inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee,
and had made both the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in
society, and that two young men had been devoted to them.

"Oh, I think he's just as lovely as he can live!" said Mela, as she
stood a moment with her sister on the scene of her triumph, where the
others had left them after the departure of their guests.

"Who?" asked Christine, deeply. As she glanced down at her ring, her
eyes burned with a softened fire.

She had allowed Beaton to change it himself