themselves to that desired field with a certainty of some few social
relations secured in advance.

They had a long-reaching, rough-cast house, in a semi-Spanish style,
high above the water. They had ten acres of lawn and thicket. They had
their own cow. And there was little Althea--a nice enough child--for a
playmate.

"Let me get Albert away from all this smoke and grime," his mother
pleaded--or argued--or demanded, dramatically. "Let me give him the
pure country air. Let me give him the right things to eat and drink. Let
me look after his poor little clothes,--if" (with another half-sob) "he
is ever to wear them again. Let me give him a real mother's real care.
You _would_ like that better, wouldn't you, dear?"

"Yes," said Albert faintly.

It is quite possible, of course, that his school really had scanted the
motherly touch.

"You see how it goes!" Raymond finally said to me, one evening, in the
shadow of the orchestrion. "And what she will dress him in _this_
time...!"

The whole situation wore on him horribly. There was a light play over
his cheeks and jaws: I almost heard his teeth grit.

A few days later Albert was transferred to his mother's place in the
country. Raymond consoled himself as best he might with the thought that
this sojourn was, after all, but preliminary, as Gertrude had herself
implied, to the coming month on the Maine coast or at Mackinac. A change
of air, a greater change of air, a change to an air immensely and
unmistakably and immediately tonic and upbuilding--that, as his mother
stated, with emphasis, was what Albert required.

So Albert, by way of introduction to his real summer, came to be
domiciled under the splendid new roof of Johnny McComas--a roof, to
Raymond's exacerbated sense, gleaming but heavy. Its tiles--he had not
seen them, but he readily visualized them--bore him down. He was not
obliged, as yet, to meet McComas himself. That came later.

PART VII

I

Albert recovered in due season--a little more rapidly, it may be, than
if he had stayed with his father, but not more completely. His education
progressed, entering another phase, and still with the unauthorized
cooeperation of his mother. During his stay with her she had really
wrought no great havoc in his wardrobe, whatever she may have
accomplished on a previous occasion. In fact, Albert had reached the
point where he dressed in a manlier fashion--a fashion fortunately
standardized beyond a mother