realization of his helplessness. There was a red spot on either
cheek--the rose of dread which her father had watched heart-sinkingly. "I
know what he _thinks_ is the matter," she added defiantly. "But that
doesn't make it so. It's just the grippe hanging on. I've felt a lot
better since the weather cleared up. It's those raw winds--and half the
time they haven't had the steam on at all in the mornings, and the office
is like an ice-box till the sun warms it."

"Vic home yet?" Peter abandoned the subject for one not much more
cheerful. Vic, fifteen and fully absorbed in his own activities, was more
and more becoming a sore subject between the two.

"No. I called up Ed's mother just before you came, but he hadn't
been there. She thought Ed was over here with Vic. I don't know
where else to ask."

"Did you try the gym?"

"No. He won't go there any more. They got after him for something he
did--broke a window somehow. There's no use fussing, dad. He'll come when
he's hungry enough. He's broke, so he can't eat down town."

Peter sighed and went away to brush his thin, graying hair carefully over
his bald spot, while Helen May brewed the tea and made final preparations
for dinner. The daffodils she arranged with little caressing pulls and
pats in a tall, slim vase of plain glass, and placed the vase in the
center of the table, just as Peter knew she would do.

"Oh, but you're sweet!" she said, and stooped with her face close above
them. "I wish I could lie down in a whole big patch of you and just look