not stay such during a period of eighteen years.  She had heard a thousand tales of “my good friend, Mark.”  Mark, thus, had been in her mind a man of her father’s age, and about such a young girl’s romantic ideas do not flock.  But from the first glimpse of the booted figure among the trees she had sensed other things.  King would have blushed had he known how picturesque he bulked in her eyes; how now, while she smiled at him so ingenuously, she was doing his thorough-going masculinity full tribute; how the ruggedness of him, the very scent of the resinous pines he bore along with him, the clear manlike look of his eyes and the warm dusky tan of face and hands—­even the effect of the careless, worn boots and the muscular throat showing through an open shirt-collar—­put a delicious little shiver of excitement into her.

Miss Gloria had a pretty way of commanding, half beseeching and yet altogether tyrannical.  King, having agreed to stay to luncheon, was in the bathroom off Gaynor’s room, shaving.  Gloria had caught her father and dragged him off into a corner.  “Oh, papa, he is simply magnificent!  Why didn’t you tell me?  Why, he isn’t a bit old and——­” And she made him repaint for her the high lights of an episode of Mark King making a name for himself and a fortune at the same time in the Klondike country.  She danced away, singing, to her abandoned friends, who were returning to the house.  “It’s the Mark King, my dears!” she told them triumphantly, not unconscious of the depressing result of her disclosures upon a couple of boys of the college age who adored openly and with frequent lapses from glorious hope to bleak despair.  “The man who made history in the Klondike.  The man who fought his way alone across fifteen hundred miles of snow and ice and won—­oh—­I don’t know what kind of a fight.  Against all kinds of odds.  The very Mark King!  He’s papa’s best friend, you know.”

“Let him be your dad’s friend, then,” said the young fellow with the pampered pompadour, his eyes showing a glint of sullen jealousy.  “That’s no reason——­”

“Why, Archie!” cried Gloria.  “You are making yourself just horrid.  You don’t want to make me sorry I ever invited you here, do you?” And a brief half-hour ago Archie had flattered himself that Gloria’s dancing had been chiefly for him.

They were all of Gloria’s “set” with one noteworthy exception.  Him she called “Mr. Gratton” while the others were Archie and Teddy and Georgia and Evelyn and Connie.  It was to this “Mr. Gratton” that she turned, having made a piquant face at the dejected college youth.

“You will like him immensely, I know,” she said, while the ears of poor Archie reddened even as he was being led away by the not very pretty but extremely comforting Georgia.  “He’s a real man, every inch of him.” ["Every inch a King!” she thought quickly, unashamed of the pun.] “A big man who does big things in a big way,” she ran on, indicating that she, too, after that brief meeting had been lured into superlatives.