first of October to the first of June, and a bridge-dinner, in which mere men are graciously included, every other Wednesday evening during the season. Mr. and Mrs. Tracey A. Miles are scheduled as next Wednesday's host and hostess."

"I take off my hat to your 'society editress'," Dundee commented with false cheerfulness, when he had laid the paper back upon Penny's desk. "She makes half a column of this one item in what must be a meager Saturday bunch of 'Society Notes,' then writes it all over again, in the past tense, for an equally meager Monday column.... Like bridge, Miss Crain?"

Penny snatched up the paper and crushed it into her wastebasket. "I do! And I like my old friends, even if I am not able, financially, to keep up with them.... If that's why you've suddenly decided to stop being—comrades—"

"Please forgive me again, Penny," he begged gently.

"I was born into that crowd, and I still belong to it, because all of them are my real friends, but get this into your thick Scotch-Irish head, Mr. Dundee—I'm working because I have to, and—and because I love it, too, and because I want to earn enough before I'm many years older to give Mother some of the things she's missing so dreadfully since—since my father failed and—and ran away."

"Ran away?" Dundee echoed incredulously. How could any man desert a daughter like this!

"Yes! Ran away!" she repeated fiercely. "I might as well tell you myself. Plenty of others will be willing to, as soon as they know you are—my friend.... As I told you, my father"—her voice broke—"my father went bankrupt, but before the courts knew it he had sent some securities to a—to a woman in New York, and when he—left us, he went to her, because he left Mother a note saying so. His defrauded creditors here have tried to—to catch him, but they haven't—yet—"

Very gently Bonnie Dundee took the small hand that was distractedly rumpling the brown waves which swept back from the widow's-peak. It lay fluttering in his bigger palm for a moment, then snatched itself away.

"I won't have you feeling sorry for me!" she cried angrily.

"Who owns your—the Primrose Meadows house now?—Mrs. Selim?" he asked.

"The 'lovely Nita'?" Her voice was scornful. "No. She rents it from Judge Hugo Marshall—or is supposed to pay him rent," she added with a trace of malice. 

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