m. (Rodney was
the youngest Lorimer.)

"I mean Jimsy King, naturally, as you quite well know, Sapphira," he
answered, pulling her down beside him on the couch and making her face
him.

"Stephen, I don't think Mr. King can afford to send him."

"Then we'll take him."

"Jimsy wouldn't let us. He is very proud,--I admire it in him."

"Do you, my dear? Then, can't you manage to admire some of his other
nice young virtues and graces?"

"I do, Stephen. I give the boy credit for all he is, but----"

"But you don't intend to let him marry your daughter if by the hookiest
hook and crookedest crook you can prevent it. I observed your Star
Chamber sessions with Mrs. Van Meter last year; I saw you wave her and
her son hopefully away; I observed, smiling with intense internal glee,
that you welcomed them back with deep if skillfully dissembled
disappointment. Top Step, God love her, sat tight. Don't you know your
own child yet, Mildred? Don't you know the well and favorably known
chemical action of absence on young and juicy hearts? Don't you
know"--he broke off to stare at her, flushed and a little breathless as
she always was in discussions and unbelievably youthful and beautiful
still, and finished in quite another key--"that you're getting
positively lovelier with each ridiculous birthday--and your aged and
infirm spouse more and more besottedly in love with you?"

She did not melt because she was tremendously in earnest. She was
pledged in her deepest heart to break up what she felt was Honor's silly
sentimentality--sentimentality with a dark and sinister background of
mortgages and young widows and Wild Kings and shabby, down-at-the-heel
houses and lawns.

"Woman," said Stephen Lorimer, "did you hear what I said? It was a
rather neat speech, I thought. However, as you did not give it the rapt
attention it merited I will now repeat it, with appropriate gestures."
He caught her in his arms as youthfully as Jimsy might have done with
Honor, and told her again, between kisses. "You lovely, silly, stubborn
thing, kiss your wise husband once more in a manner expressive of your
admiration for his unfailing sapience, and he will then, with surprising
agility for one of his years, lope across the intervening lawn and tell
James King that his son goes to Europe with us in June." He grinned back
at her from the door. "You'll do your little worst to prevent it, my
dear, that I know, but Jimsy King goes with us!"

Honor and Ji