liked having the results appreciated. She let him kiss her, carefully, because she had her hat on.

The elder James King did not seem to age with the years. "He is," Stephen Lorimer said facetiously, "only too well preserved!" His manner and mode of life remained the same, save that he lost more heavily at cards. For the first time in its history the old King place was mortgaged. In a day when every one who was any one, as Honor's mother put it, was getting a motor car, the Kings had none. Jimsy, of course, rode regally in every one else's. The Lorimers had two, an electric in which Honor's mother glided softly with her little whirring bell from clubs to luncheons and from luncheons to teas, and a rough and ready seven-passenger affair into which the whole tribe might be piled, and which Honor Carmody drove better than her stepfather, who was apt to dream at the wheel. On Sundays Stephen Lorimer took them all, Jimsy, Honor, Billy and Ted Carmody, the Lorimer twins and the last little Lorimer, on motor picnics to the beach. They drove to Santa Monica, down the Palisades, up the narrow, winding,[Pg 26] wave-washed road to the Malibou Ranch and built a fire and broiled chops and made coffee and baked potatoes, after their swim, ate like refugees and slept like puppies on the sand. In the afternoon, when they came back to the gracious old house in its wide garden on South Figueroa Street Mildred Lorimer would be waiting, in a frock he loved, to give her husband his tea, cool, lovely, remote from the rougher fun of life.

[Pg 26]

In the evenings—Sunday evenings—Honor held her joyous At Homes. Three or four favored girls and a dozen boys came to supper, a loud, hilarious meal. Takasugi, the cook, and Kada, the second boy, were given their freedom. Honor, in the quaint aprons her stepfather had picked up here and there over the world, pink, capable, with the assistance of Jimsy and her biggest brothers, got supper.

It was a lively feast. Jimsy King, in one of Kada's white jackets, waited on the table. They ate enormously, and when they had finished they pronounced their ungodly grace—a thunderous tattoo on the table edge, begun with palms and finished with elbows—

Saved

[Pg 27]

[Pg 27]

followed, while the cups and plates were still leaping and shuddering, with its secular second verse—

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