said, very low, "that was the only kind of strength that counted with you. Then—I do count with you, Honor? I do?"

She was a little startled, a little frightened, wholly uncomfortable. There was something in Carter's voice she didn't understand ... something she didn't want to understand. She pulled her hand away and managed her boyish grin. "Of course you[Pg 50] do,—goose! And you'll count more if you'll help me to look after Jimsy and have him graduate on time!" She got up quickly as her stepfather came into the room, and Carter went home, crossing the street with the rather pathetic arrogance of his halting gait, his head held high, tilted a little back, which gave him the expression of looking down on a world of swift striders.

[Pg 50]

He found his mother reading before a low fire. "Well, dearest?" She smiled up at him, yearningly.

He stood looking down at her, his face working. "Mother, I want Honor Carmody."

"Carter!"

"I want Honor Carmody." He rode over her murmured protests. "I know I'm only nineteen. I know I'm too young—she's too young. I'd expect to wait, of course. But—I want her."

Marcia Van Meter's heart cried out to her to say again as she had said all through his little-boy days, "Dearest, Mother'll get her for you! Mother'll get her for you to-morrow!" But instead her gaze went down to the page she had been reading ... the last scene in "Ghosts," where Oswald Alving says:

"Mother, give me the sun! The sun!! The Sun!!!" She shivered and shut the book with emphasis and threw it on a near-by chair. She spoke[Pg 51] brightly, reassuringly. "I'm sure she's devoted to you, dear. You are the best of friends, and that's enough for the present, isn't it?"

[Pg 51]

"No."

"Dearest, you've said yourself that you realize you're too young for anything serious, yet. Why can't you wait contentedly, until——"

"There's some one else. There's Jimsy."

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