about their studies. My goodness! it does me good to see a boy like that
of yours; business, from the word go; and your girl just scoops my
youthful affections. She's a beauty, and I guess she's good, too. Well,
well, what a world it is! Miss Christine, won't you show Mr. Beaton that
seal ring of yours? He knows about such things, and I brought him here
to see it as much as anything. It's an intaglio I brought from the other
side," he explained to Mrs. March, "and I guess you'll like to look at
it. Tried to give it to the Dryfoos family, and when I couldn't, I sold
it to 'em. Bound to see it on Miss Christine's hand somehow! Hold on!
Let him see it where it belongs, first!"

He arrested the girl in the motion she made to take off the ring, and let
her have the pleasure of showing her hand to the company with the ring on
it. Then he left her to hear the painter's words about it, which he
continued to deliver dissyllabically as he stood with her under a gas-
jet, twisting his elastic figure and bending his head over the ring.

"Well, Mely, child," Fulkerson went on, with an open travesty of her
mother's habitual address, "and how are you getting along? Mrs. Mandel
hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly? Well, that's right.
You know you'd be roaming all over the pasture if she didn't."

The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took him.
on his own ground of privileged character. He brought them all together
in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was over he had
inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee, and had made both
the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in society, and that two
young men had been devoted to them.

"Oh, I think he's just as lovely as he can live!" said Mela, as she stood