go and
leaned out.

"It's all right, Top Step," he called, meeting the leaping gladness of
her glance. "We've decided, your mother and I. You're going to L. A.
High! You're going----" but now he dropped his voice and spoke only for
the woman beside him, slipping a penitent and conciliatory arm about
her, his eyes impish, "you're going to run with the boys!"

CHAPTER II

The "Wild Kings" had lived in their fine old house ever since the
neighborhood could remember. The first and probably the wildest of them
had come out from Virginia when Los Angeles was still a drowsing Spanish
village, bringing with him an aged and excellent cellar and a flock of
negro servants. Honor's Carmody grandmother could remember the
picturesqueness of his entourage, of James King himself, the
hard-riding, hard-drinking, soft-spoken cavalier with his proud, pale
wife and his slim, high-stepping horses and his grinning blacks. The
general conviction was, Grandmother Carmody said, that he had come--or
been sent--west to make a fresh start. There was something rather
pathetically naive about that theory. There could never be a fresh start
for the "Wild Kings" in a world of excellent cellars and playing cards.
In a surprisingly short time he had re-created his earlier atmosphere
for himself--an atmosphere of charm and cheer and color ... and pride
and shame and misery, in which his wife and children lived and moved and
had their being. In the early eighties he built the big beautiful house
on South Figueroa Street, moved the last of his negro servitors and the
last of his cellar and his young family into it and died. Since that day
Kings had come and gone in it, big, bonny creatures, liked and sighed
over, and the house was shabby now, cracked and peeling for the want of
paint, the walks grass-grown, the lawn frowzy, lank and stringy curtains
at the dim windows. There were only three bottles of the historic cellar
left now, precious, cob-webbed; there was only one of the blacks, an
ancient, crabbed crone of the second generation, with a witch's hand at
cookery and a witch's temper. And there were only James King III and
James King IV, his son, Honor's Jimsy, left of the line in the old home.
The negress fed and mended them; an infrequent Japanese came in to make
futile efforts on house and garden.

The neighbors said, "How do you do, Mr. King? Like summer, really, isn't
it?" and looked hastily away. One never could be sure of finding hi