uess we can do without your lawyer, too. Because, you see, I
married Mrs. Vere because I wanted her; and I figure on supporting her.
If her folks are too cultivated to stand me, I'm sorry. But they won't
have to see me. So that's settled!"

He was honest. His glance drove that fact home to me with a fist-like
impact. There was nothing I was so poorly prepared to meet.

Phillida's hands went out to him in an impulsive movement. He covered
them both with one of his for a moment before gently putting them in her
lap with a gesture of reminder toward the revellers all about us. The
delicacy of that thought for her was another disclosure of character,
unconsciously made. Worthy or unworthy, he did love Phil.

I am not too dully obstinate to recognize a mistake of my own. Whatever
my bitterness against the man, I had to accord him some respect. I sat
for a while striving to align my forces to attack this new front.

"I don't blame you for thinking what you said, Mr. Locke," his voice
presently spoke across my perplexity. "I can see the way things came to
you; finding me here, and all! I'm glad to have had this chance to talk
it out with one of my wife's relations. I'd like them to know she'll be
taken care of. Outside of that, I guess there is nothing we have to say
to each other."

"I suppose I owe you both an apology," I said stiffly.

"Oh, that's all right--for both of us! I can see how much store you set
by her."

"But what are you going to do with her, man?" I burst forth. "Do you
expect to keep her here; sitting at a table in this place and watching
you do your turn, making your fellow performers her friends, seeing and
learning----?" I checked my outpouring of disgust. "Or do you propose to
shut her up in some third-class boarding house day and night while you
hang around here? Good heavens, Vere, do you realize what either life
would be for an nineteen-year-old girl brought up as she has been?"

He colored.

"As for bringing up," he retorted, "I guess she couldn't be a lot more
miserable than her folks worried her into being. But--you're right about
the rest. That's why I was going to leave her with her folks yet a
while, until I had a place for her. I mean, while I saved up enough to
get the place."

"But I wrote to him when I failed in my exams, Cousin Roger," Phillida
broke in. "I told him that I would not go home. I could not bear it. I
was coming to him, and he would just have to keep me with him or I