The great contralto shrugged her thick shoulders. "I fear not. I think not."

His face lengthened. "Why?"

"Because, my friend, she will care more for living. She will not care so greatly to get, that large child. She will only give. She has not the fine relentless selfishness to make the artist. Well, we shall see. Life may break her. Send her to me. In two years, yes? No, no, I will have no thanks. It is so small a thing to do.... One grows fat and old; it is good to have youngness near. Now, go, my friend. I shall gargle my throat and sleep." She gave him a hot, plump hand to kiss.

Honor was not especially impressed. She rather thought, when the time came, she should prefer to go[Pg 24] to Stanford, but she liked her music lessons, meanwhile. It filled up her time, the business of singing, in that last year when she was more or less marking time and helping Jimsy through.

[Pg 24]

Her stepfather watched her with growing amazement. So far as any one might judge, and to Mrs. Lorimer's tearful relief, Honor's attitude toward the last of the "Wild Kings" was at seventeen what it had been at twelve, at six.

"I was right, wasn't I?" Stephen wanted to know.

"Well ... if you can only keep on being right about it! I'm so thankful about her singing. That year abroad will be wonderful. She'll meet new people ... real men."

"Young Jimsy is exhibiting every known symptom of becoming a real man."

"Yes, but he's a King."

"That appears to be the universal opinion regarding him."

"Stephen dear, don't be ridiculous! You've always been as bewitched about the boy as Honor herself." Mrs. Lorimer was dressed for a luncheon and her husband, heavy-eyed and flushed of face, had cut short his late morning sleep to drive her. She was still for him the everlasting Helen.

"Mildred," he said, quitting the battlefield for the[Pg 25] eternal balcony, "do you know that you are lovelier this instant than you were the day I married you?"

[Pg 25]

Mrs. Lorimer knew it quite well. It was due somewhat to good management as well as luck, and she 

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