n't just a
silly whim, as grandmother thinks; it's the one thing in the world I care
about--now."

Quin started to speak, reconsidered it, and whistled softly instead. He
had formed a Spartan resolve to put aside his own claims for the present,
and be in word and deed that "best friend" to whom he had urged Eleanor
to come in time of trouble. With heroic self-control, he set himself to
meet her problems, even going so far as to encourage her spirit of
independence and to help her build air-castles that at present were her
only refuge from despair.

"Just think of all the wonderful things I can do if I succeed," she said.
"Papa Claude need never take another pupil, and Myrna can go to college,
and Cass and Fan Loomis can get married."

"And don't forget Rose," suggested Quin, to keep up the interest. "You
must do something handsome for her. She's a great girl, Rose is!"

Eleanor looked at him curiously, and the smallest of puckers appeared
between her perfectly arched brows. Quin saw it at once, and decided that
Rose's recent handling of Mr. Phipps had met with disfavor, and he sighed
as he thought of the hold the older man still had on Eleanor.

During the next difficult weeks Quin devoted all his spare time to the
grateful occupation of diverting the Martels' woe-begone little guest.
Hardly a day passed that he did not suggest some excursion that would
divert her without bringing her into contact with her own social world,
from which she shrank with aversion. On Sundays and half-holidays he took
her on long trolley rides to queer out-of-the-way places where she had
never been before: to Zachary Taylor's grave, and George Rogers Clark's
birthplace, to the venerable tree in Iroquois Park that bore the carved
inscription, "D. Boone, 1735." One Sunday morning they went to Shawnee
Park and rented a rowboat, in which they followed the windings of the
Ohio River below the falls, and had innumerable adventures that kept them
out until sundown.

Eleanor had never before had so much liberty. She came and went as she
pleased; and if she missed a meal the explanation that she was out with
Quin was sufficient. Sometimes when the weather was good she would walk
over to Central Park and meet him when he came home in the evening. They
would sit under the bare trees and talk, or look over the books he had
brought her from the library.

At first she had found his selections a tame substitute for her recent
highly spiced literary