As Dick and the doctor exchanged cordial greetings, the latter’s friendly eyes challenged the young man’s and were answered.  Plainly as if words had been spoken the doctor knew that Dick was keeping faith with the old pact, living up to the name the little girl Tony had given him in her impulsive generosity.

“Something not quite right, though,” he thought.  “The boy isn’t all happy.  Wonder what the trouble is.  Probably a girl.  Usually is at that age.”

At the wheel beside the doctor was his namesake and neighbor, Philip Lambert.  Phil was graduating, himself, this year from the college across the river, a sturdy athlete of some note and a Phi Beta Kappa man as well.  Out of a harum-scarum, willful boyhood he had emerged into a finely tempered, steady young manhood.  The Dunbury wiseacres who had been wont to shake their heads over Phil’s youthful escapades and prophesy a bad end for such a devil-may-care youngster now patted themselves complacently on the back, as wiseacres will, and declared they had always known the boy would turn out a credit to his family and the town.

On the back seat were Phil’s sisters, the pretty twins, Charley and Clare, still astonishingly alike at twenty, as they had been at twelve, and still full of the high spirits and ready laughter and wit that had made them the life of the Hill in the old days.  Neither looked a day over sixteen, but Clare had already been teaching two years in a Dunbury public school and Charley was to go into nurse’s training in the fall.

Larry, the young doctor, as Dunbury had taken to calling him in distinction from his uncle, was not yet arrived, as Tony had explained; but Ted, her younger brother, was very much on the scene, arrayed in all the extravagant niceties of modish attire affected by university undergraduates.  At twenty, Ted Holiday was as handsome as the traditional young Greek god and possessed of a godlike propensity to do as he liked and the devil take the consequences.  Already Ned Holiday’s younger son had acquired something of a reputation as a high flier among his own sex, and a heart breaker among the fairer one.  Reckless, debonair, utterly irresponsible, he was still “terrible Teddy” as his father had jocosely dubbed him long ago.  Yet he was quite as lovable as he was irrepressible, and had a manifest grace to counterbalance every one of his many faults.  His soberer brother Larry worried uselessly over Ted’s misdeeds, and took him sharply to task for them; but even Larry admitted that there was something rather magnificent about Ted and that possibly in the end he would come out the soundest Holiday of them all.

There remains only Carlotta to be introduced.  Carlotta was lovely to look upon.  A poet speaks somewhere of a face “made out of a rose.”  Carlotta had that kind of a face and her eyes were of that deep, violet shade which works mischief and magic in the hearts of men.  As for her hair, it might well have been the envy of any princess, in or out of the covers of a book, so fine spun was it in texture, so pure gold in color, like the warm, vivid shimmer of tropical sunshine.  She lifted an inquiring gaze now to Dick, as she held out her hand in acknowledgment of the introduction, and Dick murmured something platitudinous, bowed politely over the hand and never noticed what color her eyes were.  A single track mind is both a curse and a protection to a man.