"She's as good as we are," he declared, snapping the little door of one of the lanterns.

"I don't deny that."

"A generation or two ago we were all farming people together. The Willoughbys and the Brands and the Thorleys and the Fays were on an equal footing. They worked for one another and intermarried. The progress of the country has taken some of us and hurled us up, while it has seized others of us and smashed us down; but we should try to get over that when it comes to human intercourse."

"That's what I was doing when I asked her to join our Friendly Society."

"Pff! The deuce you were! I know your friendly societies. Keep those who are down down. Help the humble to be humbler by making them obsequious."

"You know nothing at all about it," she declared, with spirit. "In trying to make things better you're content to spin theories, while we put something into practice."

He snapped the door of the second lamp with a little bang. "Put something into practice, with the result that people resent it."

"With the result that Rosie Fay resented it; but she's not a fair example. She's proud and rebellious and intense. I never saw any one just like her."

"You probably never saw any one who had to be like her because they'd had her luck. Look here, Lois," he said, with sudden earnestness, "I want you to be a friend to that girl."

She opened her eyes in mild surprise at his intensity. "There's nothing I should like better, if I knew how."

"But you do know how. It's easy enough. Treat her as you would a girl in your own cla.s.s--Elsie Darling, for instance."

"It's not so simple as that. When Elsie Darling came back after five or six years abroad mamma and I drove into town and called on her. She wasn't in, and we left our cards. Later, we invited her to lunch or to dinner. I should be perfectly willing to go through the same formalities with Miss Fay--only she'd think it queer. It would be queer. It would be queer because she hasn't got--what shall I say?--she hasn't got the social machinery for that kind of ceremoniousness. The machinery means the method of approach, and with people who have to live as she does it's the method of approach that presents the difficulty. It's not as easy as it looks."

"Very well, then; let us admit that it's hard. The harder it is the more it's the job for you."

There was an illuminating quality in her smile that atoned for lack of beauty. "Oh, if you put it in that way--"

"I do put it in that way," he declared, with an earnestness toned down by what was almost wistfulness. "There are so many things in which I want help, Lois--and you're the one to help me."

She held out her hand with characteristic frankness. "I'll do anything I can, Thor. Just tell me what you want me to do when you want me to do it--and I'll try."

"Oh, there'll be a lot of things in which we shall have to pull together," he said, as he held her hand. "I want you to remember, if ever any trouble comes, that"--he hesitated for a word that wouldn't say too much for the moment--"that I'll be there."

"Thank you, Thor. That's a great comfort."

She withdrew her hand quietly. Quietly, too, she a.s.sured him, as she moved toward the steps, that she would not fail to force herself again on Rosie Fay. "And about that other matter--the one you spoke of first--you'll tell me more by and by, won't you?"

After her capacity for ringing true, his conscientiousness prompted him to let her see that she could feel quite sure of him. "I'll tell you anything I can find out; and one of these days, Lois, I must--I must--say a lot more."

She mounted a step or two without turning away from him. "Oh, well," she said, lightly, as though dismissing a topic of no importance, "there'll be plenty of time."

But her smile was a happy one--so happy that he who smiled rarely smiled back at her from the runabout.

He could scarcely be expected to know as yet that his pleasure was not in any happiness of hers, but in the help she might bring to a little creature whose image had haunted him all the afternoon--a little creature whose desperate flower-like face looked up at him from a background of poinsettias.

CHAPTER V

On coming to the table that evening Claude begged his mother to excuse him for not having dressed for dinner, on the ground that he had an engagement with Billy Cheever. Mrs. Masterman pardoned him with a gracious inclination of the head that made her diamond ear-rings sparkle. No one in the room could be unaware that she disapproved of Claude's informality. Not only did it shock her personal delicacy to dine with men who concealed their shirt-bosoms under the waistcoats they had worn all day, but it contravened the aims by which during her entire married life she had endeavored to elevate the society around her. She herself was one to whom the refinements were as native as foliage to a tree. "It's all right, Claudie dear; but you do know I like you to dress for the evening, don't you?" Without waiting for the younger son to speak, she continued graciously to the elder: "And you, Thor. What have you been doing with yourself to-day?"

Her polite inclusion of her stepson was meant to start "her men," as she called them, in the kind of conversation in which men were most at ease, that which concerned themselves. Thor replied while consuming his soup in the manner acquired in Parisian and Viennese restaurants frequented by young men:

"Got a patient."

Hastily Claude introduced a subject of his own. "Ought to go and see 'The Champion,' father. Hear it's awfully good. Begins with a prize-fight--"

But the father's attention was given to Thor. "Who've you picked up?"

"Fay's wife--Fay, the gardener."

"Indeed? Have to whistle for your fee."

"Oh, I know that--"

"Thor, _please_!" Mrs. Masterman begged. "Don't eat so fast."

"If you know it already," the father continued, "I should think you'd have tried to squeak out of it." He said "know it alweady" and "twied to squeak," owing to a difficulty with the letter _r_ which gave an appealing, childlike quality to his speech. "If you start in by taking patients who are not going to pay--"

Claude sought another diversion. "What does it matter to Thor? In three months' time he'll be able to pay sick people for coming to him--what?"

"That's not the point," Masterman explained. "A doctor has no right to pauperize people"--he said "pauper-wize people"--"any more than any one else."

"Oh, as to that," Thor said, forcing himself to eat slowly and sit straight in the style commended by his stepmother, "it won't need a doctor to pauperize poor Fay."

"Quite right there," his father agreed. "He's done it himself."

Thor considered the moment a favorable one for making his appeal.

"Claude and I have been talking him over--"

"The devil we have!" Claude exclaimed, indignantly.

"What's that?" Masterman's handsome face, which after his day's work was likely to be gray and lifeless, grew sharply interrogative. Time had chiseled it to an incisiveness not incongruous with a lingering air of youth. His hair, mustache, and imperial were but touched with gray. His figure was still lithe and spare. It was the custom to say of him that he looked but the brother of his two strapping sons.

Claude emphasized his annoyance. "Talking him over! I like that! You blow into the office just as I'm ready to come home, and begin cross-questioning me about father's affairs. I tell you I don't know anything about them. If you call that talking him over--well, you're welcome to your own use of terms."

The head of the house busied himself in carving the joint which had been placed before him. "If you want information, Thor, ask me."

"I don't want information, father; and I don't think Claude is fair in saying I cross-questioned him. I only said that I thought he and I ought to do what we could to get you to renew Fay's lease."

"Oh, did you? Then I can save you the trouble, because I'm not going to."

The declaration was so definite that it left Thor with nothing to say.

"Poor old Fay has worked pretty hard, hasn't he?" he ventured at last.

"Possibly. So have I."