cottage, but no other signs of life. But at his approach there was a rustle of modish skirts on the porch and a vision appeared; the vision taking the form of a strikingly handsome young woman, round limbed, scarlet-lipped, with midnight eyes and hair. The light from the near-by street lamp framed her in the porch opening for David as he swung up the path, and it was a picture to stir the blood in the veins of an anchorite.

[56]

“Gloriana!” he said, taking both of her hands, and giving her the name she had given herself as soon as she was old enough to hate the one her parents had given her.

“Davie! you’ve come at last, have you?” she breathed. “’Tis long ago I’d given you up. A week you’ve been back, and but for the papers I’d never have known it!”

“Don’t scold me, Glo,” he begged. “If you could only know how busy I’ve been. This is the first spare minute I’ve had in the week, honestly. Where are your father and mother?”

“They’ve gone up-town to the movie. You’ll be coming in?”

[57]“Just for a little while.”

[57]

She led the way into the cottage, into the room of the dimmed light. It was exactly as David remembered it from a time when he had often been made at home in it; the big-figured red carpet, the marble-topped center table with the family Bible, the family photograph album, and a crocheted mat in the middle for the foot of an ornate parlor lamp with a crimson shade. Also, there were the same stiff-backed chairs and the same sofa upholstered in green rep. In one corner was the young woman’s piano. John Fallon was a foreman in the Judson Foundries and could well afford to buy his daughter a piano, if he chose. David sat down on one of the uncomfortable chairs.

“Turn up the light and let me see you, Glo,” he said, and when she did it: “Jove! but you picked the right name for yourself years ago when we were kiddies! The movie stars have nothing on you—not one of them.”

“Flatterer!” she laughed, and if there were a faint suggestion of the “h” after the “t’s” he did not mind. Her Irish accent had always seemed to harmonize perfectly with her rich, “black-Irish” beauty. Then: “The two years have been making you into a man, Davie. ’Twas in your[58] letters when I’d be reading them. Don’t be propping yourself on that chair; come over here and be yourself.”

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