id not
respond, he repeated a little sharply, "Tell me about your
grandparents, won't you?"

The child still hesitated. David bowed to the wife of a Standard Oil
director in a passing limousine, and one of the season's prettiest
debutantes, who was walking; and because he was only twenty-four, and
his mother was very, very ambitious for him, he wondered if the tear
smudge on the face of his companion had been evident from the
sidewalk, and decided that it must have been.

"I don't know how to tell," the child said at last, "I don't know what
you want me to say."

"I don't want you to say anything in particular, just in general, you
know."

David stuck. The violet eyes were widening with misery, there was no
doubt about it. "Game, clean through," he said to himself. Aloud he
continued. "Well, you know, Eleanor.--Never say 'Well,' if you can
possibly avoid it, because it's a flagrant Americanism, and when you
travel in foreign parts you're sure to regret it,--well, you know, if
you are to be in a measure my ward--and you are, my dear, as well as
the ward of your Aunts Beulah and Margaret and Gertrude, and your
Uncles Jimmie and Peter--I ought to begin by knowing a little
something of your antecedents. That is why I suggested that you tell
me about your grandparents. I don't care what you tell me, but I think
it would be very suitable for you to tell me something. Are they
native Cape Codders? I'm a New Englander myself, you know, so you may
be perfectly frank with me."

"They're not summer folks," the child said. "They just live in
Colhassett all the year round. They live in a big white house on the
depot road, but they're so old now, they can't keep it up. If it was
painted it would be a real pretty house."

"Your grandparents are not very well off then?"

The child colored. "They've got lots of things," she said, "that
Grandfather brought home when he went to sea, but it was Uncle Amos
that sent them the money they lived on. When he died they didn't have
any."

"How long has he been dead?"

"Two years ago Christmas."

"You must have had some money since then."

"Not since Uncle Amos died, except for the rent of the barn, and the
pasture land, and a few things like that."

"You must have had money put away."

"No," the little girl answered. "We didn't. We didn't have any money,
except what came in the way I said. We sold some old-fashioned dishes,
and a little bit of cranberry bog for twenty-five dolla