remember his watching me, I’d a hatful of florists’ and tailors’ bills to pay—watching me scribble off checks for twice his year’s income, right there in his office. I bought my dog, ‘Maggie’—that was ‘Queen Vic’s’ mother—that day. They were great years, David; young men don’t know anything like them to-day—but a better man might have made a better job of them! I didn’t want a wife—I wanted all the women in the world, until the day your mother walked in here with you in her arms, and that was a dozen years later. I wish we’d had a houseful like you, David—I wish Tom had had sisters and brothers—might have held the boy! Well,” the master of Wastewater had ended, “if Tom’s not here, turn it all over to Flora’s girl when she’s twenty-one. Women manage these things better. Sylvia’ll have her fun and build for the future, too. Or maybe she and the boy may make a match of it—they’re both Flemings, Dave. And more than that—your Aunt Flora has a score to settle with me—there’s a sort of poetic justice in her daughter’s getting it all. She—she cared, in her way—she’s not a woman to care easily, either. And she forgave my marrying your mother—she stood by your mother. But when it came to Cecily—Flora and I were to have been married then, you know—she won’t mention her name to this day! I’ve treated a good many women badly,” Roger had confessed, with a twitch of his handsome mouth, “but I never treated any one as badly as poor Flora.”

[22]

David had been pleased, and secretly amused, to see that the old incorrigible smile was lighting his stepfather’s magnificent eyes. Upon whatever episodes in the past Roger’s mind was moving, he found them[23] sweet. David liked to fancy the bustled and chignonned ladies of the ’Eighties thrilling over “Papagontier” roses from the irresistible Roger Fleming of Wastewater, the two-button kid gloves that agitated the clicking fans in the opera house when this winner of hearts sauntered in.

[23]

And after all, Death had come kindly, as Life had, to Black Roger Fleming. There had been one more hope about Tom; Roger had been eagerly and confidently flinging clothes into his well-worn trunk, telephoning, shouting directions, exulting in the need for action, all through a sweet June morning. Sylvia, nine years old, and Gabrielle, six, had been running at full speed along the upper hall, and they saw him come to his door—saw him fall, with one hand clutching his heart.

Aunt Lily’s periodic melancholia had developed into a more serious condition now, and she was away on one of her long absences in a sanitarium. But David was there. Flora was 

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