ll run for my
life. I give you warning, David."

"Warning is all I want," David said contentedly. He could barely reach
her hand across the intervening expanse of leather couch, but he
accomplished it,--he was too wise to move closer to her. "You're a
lovely, lovely being," he said reverently. "God grant I may reach you
and hold you."

She curled a warm little finger about his.

"What would Mrs. Bolling say?" she asked practically.

"To tell you the truth, she spoke of it the other day. I told her the
Eleanor story, and that rather brought her to her senses. She wouldn't
have liked that, you know; but now all the eligible buds are plucked,
and she wants me to settle down."

"Does she think I'm a settling kind of person?"

"She wouldn't if she knew the way you go to my head," David murmured.
"Oh, she thinks that you'll do. She likes the ten Hutchinsons."

"Maybe I'd like them better considered as connections of yours,"
Margaret said abstractedly.

David lifted the warm little finger to his lips and kissed it
swiftly.

"Where are you going?" he asked, as she slipped away from him and
stood poised in the doorway.

"I'm going to put on something appropriate to the occasion," she
answered.

When she came back to him she was wearing the most delicate and
cobwebby of muslins with a design of pale purple passion flowers
trellised all over it, and she gave him no chance for a moment alone
with her all the rest of the evening.

Sometime later she showed him Eleanor's parting letter, and he was
profoundly touched by the pathetic little document.

As the holidays approached Eleanor's absence became an almost
unendurable distress to them all. The annual Christmas dinner party, a
function that had never been omitted since the acquisition of David's
studio, was decided on conditionally, given up, and again decided on.

"We do want to see one another on Christmas day,--we've got presents
for one another, and Eleanor would hate it if she thought that her
going away had settled that big a cloud on us. She slipped out of our
lives in order to bring us closer together. We'll get closer together
for her sake," Margaret decided.

But the ordeal of the dinner itself was almost more than they had
reckoned on. Every detail of traditional ceremony was observed even to
the mound of presents marked with each name piled on the same spot on
the couch, to be opened with the serving of the coffee.

"I got something for Eleanor,"