usic and pictures that Phyllis was interested in, and had
found nobody to share her interest with for so long--so long! She felt
happily running though everything the general, easy taking-for-granted
of all the old, gentle, inflexible standards of breeding that she had
nearly forgotten, down in the heart of the city among her obstreperous,
affectionate little foreigners.

They had coffee in the long old-fashioned salon parlor, and then Mr. De
Guenther straightened himself, and Mrs. De Guenther folded her veined,
ringed old white hands, and Phyllis prepared thrilledly to listen.
Surely now she would hear about that Different Line of Work.

There was nothing, at first, about work of any sort. They merely began
to tell her alternately about some clients of theirs, a Mrs. Harrington
and her son: rather interesting people, from what Phyllis could make
out. She wondered if she was going to hear that they needed a librarian.

"This lady, my client, Mrs. Harrington," continued her host gravely, "is
the one for whom I may ask you to consider doing some work. I say may,
but it is a practical certainty. She is absolutely alone, my dear Miss
Braithwaite, except for her son. I am afraid I must ask you to listen to
a long story about them."

It was coming!

"Oh, but I want to hear!" said Phyllis, with that quick, affectionate
sympathy of hers that was so winning, leaning forward and watching them
with the lighted look in her blue eyes. It all seemed to her tired,
alert mind like some story she might have read to her children, an
Arabian Nights narrative which might begin, "And the Master of the
House, ascribing praise unto Allah, repeated the following Tale."

"There have always been just the two of them, mother and son," said the
Master of the House. "And Allan has always been a very great deal to his
mother."

"Poor Angela!" murmured his wife.

"They are old friends of ours," her husband explained. "My wife and Mrs.
Harrington were schoolmates.

"Well, Allan, the boy, grew up, dowered with everything a mother could
possibly desire for her son, personally and otherwise. He was handsome
and intelligent, with much charm of manner."

"I know now what people mean by 'talking like a book,'" thought Phyllis
irreverently. "And I don't believe any one man _could_ be all that!"

"There was practically nothing," Mr. De Guenther went on, "which the
poor lad had not. That was one trouble, I imagine. If he had not been
highly intell