old chap. You'd be a godsend to the girls in the dump."

Thor's dancing days were over before Lois's had begun, but he could imagine what they had been to her. He could look back over the four or five years that separated her from the ordeal, and still see her in "the dump"—tall, timid, furtively watching the young men with those swimming brown orbs of hers, wondering whether or not she should have a partner; heartsore under her finery, often driving homeward in the weary early hours with tears streaming down her cheeks. He knew as much about it as if he had been with her. He suffered for her retrospectively. He did it to a degree that made his long face sorrowful.

The sorrow caused Lois some impatience. "For mercy's sake, Thor, don't look at me like that! It isn't as bad as you seem to think. I don't mind it."

"But I do," he declared, with indignation, only to feel that he was slowly coloring.

He colored because the statement brought him within measurable distance of a declaration which he meant to make, but for which he was not ready.

She seemed to divine his embarrassment, speaking with forced lightness. "Please don't waste your sympathy on me. If any one's to be pitied, it's mamma. I'm such a disappointment to her. Let's talk of something else. Where have you been to-day, and what have you been doing?"

He was not blind to her tact, counting it to her credit for the future, and asked abruptly if she knew Fay, the gardener.

"Fay, the gardener?" she echoed. "I know who he is." She went more directly to the point in saying, "I know his daughter."

"Well, she's having a hard time."

"Is she? I should think she might."

His face grew keener. "Why do you say that?"

"Oh, I don't know—she's that sort. At least, I should judge she was that sort from the little I've seen of her."

"How much have you seen of her?"

"Almost nothing; but little as it was, it impressed itself on my mind. I went to see her once at Mr. Whitney's suggestion."

"Whitney? He's the rector at St. John's, isn't he? What had he to do with her? She doesn't belong to his church?"

Lois explained. "It was when we established the branch of the Girl's Friendly Society at St. John's. Mr. Whitney thought she might care to join it."

"And did she?"

"No; quite the other way. When I went to ask her, she resented it. She had an idea I was patronizing her. That's the difficulty in approaching girls like that."

He looked at her with a challenging expression. "Girls like what?"

"I suppose I mean girls who haven't much money—or who've got to work."

He still challenged her, his head thrown back. "They probably don't consider themselves inferior to you for that reason. It wouldn't be American if they did."

"And it wouldn't be American if I did; and I don't. They only make me feel so because they feel it so strongly themselves. That's what's not American; and it isn't on my part, but on theirs. They force their sentiment back on me. They make me patronizing whether I will or no."

"And were you patronizing when you went to see Miss Fay?"

To conceal the slightly irritated attentiveness with which he waited for her reply he began to light his motor lamps. Condescension toward Rosie Fay suddenly struck him as offensive, no matter from whom it came.

"I'm sure I don't know," she replied, indifferently. "There was something about her that disconcerted me."