"Isn't that exactly like her?" Madam was saying. "Refusing to go in the first place, and now objecting to coming home."

"Well, it isn't especially gay for her here, is it?" Miss Enid ventured in feeble defense. "I am afraid we are rather dull company for a young girl."

"Well, make it gay," commanded Madam. "You and Isobel aren't so old and feeble that you can't think of some way to entertain young people."

"A tea?" suggested Miss Enid.

"A tea would never tempt Eleanor. She's too much her mother's child to enjoy anything so staid and respectable."

"Why don't you give her a dance?" suggested Quin enthusiastically, looking up from his work.

"Give who a dance?" demanded Madam in surprise.

"Miss Eleanor," said Quin, bending over his work and blushing to the roots of his stubby hair.

The three ladies exchanged startled glances; then Miss Enid said:

"Of course. I had forgotten that you met her the night of the accident. I wonder if we _could_ give the dear child a party?"

"It is not to be thought of," said Miss Isobel, "with no regular butler, and mother ill----"

"I tell you, I'm _not_ ill!" snapped Madam. "I intend to be up and about by Easter. I'll give as many parties as I like. Hurry up with those crutches, Graham; do you think I am going to wait all night?"

One of Quin's first acts upon coming into the house had been to aid and abet Madam in her determination to use her injured leg. Dr. Rawlins had infuriated her by his pessimistic warnings and his dark suggestions of a wheeled chair.

"We'll show 'em what you can do when you get that cast off," Quin had rea.s.sured her with the utmost confidence. "I've limbered up heaps of stiff legs for the fellows. It takes patience and grit. I got the patience and you got the grit, so there we are!"

Now that the cast was off, a few steps were attempted each night, during which painful operation Miss Enid fled to another room to shed tears of apprehension, while Miss Isobel hovered about the hall, ready to call the doctor if anything happened.

"Is that better?" he asked now, as he got Madam to her feet and carefully adjusted the crutches. "If you say they are too short, I'll tell you what the little man said when he was teased about his legs. 'They reach the ground,' he said; 'what more can you ask?'"

"Shut up your nonsense, and mind what you are doing!" cried Madam. "My leg is worse than it was yesterday. I can't put my foot to the ground."

"Oh, yes, you can," Quin insisted, coaxing her from the bed-post to the dresser. "You are coming on fine. I never saw but one person do better.

That was a guy I knew in France who never danced a step until he lost a leg, and then his cork leg taught his other leg to do the fox-trot."

"Didn't I tell you to hush!" commanded Madam, laughing in spite of herself. "You will have me falling over here in a minute."

When she was back in her chair and Quin was leaving, she beckoned to him.

"What about Mr. Ranny?" she asked in an anxious whisper. "Was he at the office to-day?"

Quin had been dreading the question, but when it came he did not evade it. Randolph Bartlett's lapses from grace were coming with such alarming frequency that the sisters' frantic efforts to keep the truth from their mother only resulted in arousing her suspicion and making her more unhappy.

"No," said Quin; "he hasn't been there for a week. He's never going to be any better as long as he stays in the business. You don't know what he has to stand from Mr. Bangs."

"I know what Mr. Bangs has had to stand from him."

"Yes; but Mr. Ranny's never mean. He is one of the kindest, nicest gentlemen I ever met up with. But he can't stand being nagged at all the time, and he feels that he don't count for anything. He says Mr. Bangs considers him a figurehead, and that he'd rather be selling shoestrings for himself than be in partnership with him."

"Yes, and if I let him go that's what he _would_ be doing," said Madam bitterly.

"Mr. Chester don't think so," persisted Quin; "he says Mr. Ranny's got a lot of ability."

"Don't quote that sissified Francis Chester to me. He may be a good man--I suppose he is; but I can't abide the sight of him. He goes around holding one hand in the other as if he were afraid he'd spill it! What did you say he said about Ranny?"

"He said he had ability; that if he was on his own in the country some place----"

"'On his own'!" Madam's contempt was great. "He hasn't _got_ any own.

He's just like the girls--no force or decision about any of them. Their father wasn't like that; I am sure _I'm_ not. What's the matter with them, anyhow?"

Quin looked her straight in the eyes. "Do you want to know, honest?"

Disconcerting as it was to have an oratorical question taken literally, Madam's curiosity prompted her to nod her head.

"The same thing's the matter with them," said Quin, with brutal frankness, "that's the matter with your leg. They've been broken and kept in the cast too long."

Then, before he could get the berating he surely deserved, he was off down the stairs, disturbing the silence of the house with his cheerful whistle.

At breakfast the next morning he scented trouble. Until now he had made little headway with the two sisters, having been too much occupied in storming the fortress of Madam's regard to concern himself with the outlying districts. But this morning he met with an even colder reception than usual. In vain he fired off his best jokes: Miss Enid remained pale and languid, and Miss Isobel presided over the coffee-pot as if it had been a funeral urn. A crisis was evidently pending, and he determined to meet it half way.

"Is Queen Vic mad at me?" he asked suddenly, leaning forward on his folded arms and smiling with engaging candor.

Miss Isobel started to pour the cream into the sugar-bowl, but caught herself in the act.

"If you mean my mother," she said with reproving dignity, "she has asked me to tell you--that is, we all think it best----"

"For me to go?" Quin finished it for her. "Now, look here, Miss Isobel; you can fire me, but you know you can't fire the furnace! Who is going to stay here at night? Who is going to carry Madam up and down stairs? Of course I don't want to b.u.t.t in, but if ever a house needed a man it's this one. Why don't you have me stay on until things get to running easy again?"

There was an embarra.s.sing pause during which Miss Isobel fidgeted with the cups and saucers and Miss Enid bit her lips nervously.

"Don't you-all like me?" persisted Quin with his terrible directness.

Now, Miss Isobel had spent her life in evasions and reservations and compromises. To have even a personal liking stripped thus in public offended her maiden modesty, and she scurried to the cover of silence.

"Of course we like you," murmured Miss Enid, coming to her rescue. "We like you very much, Mr. Graham, and we appreciate your kindness in coming to help us out. But mother feels that we shouldn't impose on your good nature any longer."

Quin shook his impatient head.

"That's not it," he said. "She's mad at something I said last night, and she's got a right to be. It was true all right, but it was none of my business. I made up my mind before I went to bed that I was going to apologize. I can fix things up with her. It's you and Miss Isobel I can't understand. You say you like me, but you don't act like it. I know I make mistakes about lots of things, and that I do things wrong and say things I oughtn't to. But all you got to do is to call me down. I want to help you; but that's not all--I want to learn the game. When a fellow has knocked around with men since he was a kid----"

He broke off suddenly and stared into his coffee-cup.

"I think he might go up and speak to mother, don't you, Isobel?" asked Miss Enid tentatively.

Quin pushed back his chair and rose precipitately from the table, dragging the cloth away as he did so.

"That's not the point!" he said heatedly. "It's for you two to decide, as well as her. Do you want me to go or to stay?"