"My granddaughter, Becky Bannister."

With George's sparkling gaze bent full upon her, Becky blushed.

Randy saw the blush. "Oh, Lord," he said, under his breath, and stuck
his hands in his pockets.

"I've always called it a quail," Dalton was saying.

"You would if you come from the North. To be exact, it isn't either,
it's an American Bob-white. I'd be glad to have you come up and look at
my collection. There is every kind of bird that has been shot in
Virginia fields or Virginia waters. I've got a Trumpeter Swan. The last
one was seen in the Chesapeake in sixty-nine. Mine was killed and
stuffed in the forties. He is in a perfect state of preservation, and in
the original glass case."

"I'd like to come," George told him. "Could I--to-night? I don't know
just how long I shall be staying down."

"Any time--any time. To-night, of course. There's nothing I like better
than to talk about my birds, unless it is to eat them. Isn't that so,
Claudia?"

"Yes, Father." Mrs. Beaufort was studying Dalton closely. His manner was
perfect. It was, indeed, she decided, too perfect. "He is thinking too
much of the way he does it." The one sin in Aunt Claudia's mind was
social self-consciousness. People who thought all of the time about
manners hadn't been brought up to them. They must have them without