ement of the case.

"It's more than likely," said Honora, wickedly. "He hasn't kissed me for
two years."

"Why, Peter," said Uncle Tom, "you act as though it were warm to-night.
It was only seventy when we came in to dinner."

"Take me out to the park," commanded Honora.

"Tom," said Aunt Mary, as she stood on the step and watched them cross
the street, "I wish the child would marry him. Not now, of course," she
added hastily,--a little frightened by her own admission, "but later.
Sometimes I worry over her future. She needs a strong and sensible man. I
don't understand Honora. I never did. I always told you so. Sometimes I
think she may be capable of doing something foolish like--like
Randolph."

Uncle Tom patted his wife on the shoulder.

"Don't borrow trouble, Mary," he said, smiling a little. "The child is
only full of spirits. But she has a good heart. It is only human that she
should want things that we cannot give her."

"I wish," said Aunt Mary, "that she were not quite so good-looking."

Uncle Tom laughed. "You needn't tell me you're not proud of it," he
declared.

"And I have given her," she continued, "a taste for dress."

"I think, my dear," said her husband, "that there were others who
contributed to that."

"It was my own vanity. I should have combated the tendency in her," said
Aunt Mary.

"If you had dressed Honora in calico, you could not have changed her,"
replied Uncle Tom, with conviction.

In the meantime Honora and Peter had mounted the electric car, and were
speeding westward. They had a seat to themselves, the very first one on
the "grip"--that survival of the days of cable cars. Honora's eyes
brightened as she held on to her hat, and the stray wisps of hair about
her neck stirred in the breeze.

"Oh, I wish we would never stop, until we came to the Pacific Ocean!" she
exclaimed.

"Would you be content to stop then?" he asked. He had a trick of looking
downward with a quizzical expression in his dark grey eyes.

"No," said Honora. "I should want to go on and see everything in the
world worth seeing. Sometimes I feel positively as though I should die if
I had to stay here in St. Louis."

"You probably would die--eventually," said Peter.

Honora was justifiably irritated.

"I could shake you, Peter!"

He laughed.

"I'm afraid it wouldn't do any good," he answered.

"If I were a man," she proclaimed, "I shouldn't stay here. I'd go to New
York--I'd be somebody--I'd make