“I wish you would do something next month, not as a favor to me particularly, but to ease things along for Charlie and Linda.  They are genuinely in love with each other.  I can see you turning up your little nose at that.  I know you’ve held a rather biased opinion of your brother and his works since that unfortunate winter.  But it doesn’t do to be too self-righteous.  Charlie, then, was very little different from any rather headlong, self-centered, red-blooded youngster.  I’m afraid I’m expressing myself badly.  What I mean is that while he was drifting then into a piggy muddle, he had the sense to take a brace before his lapses became vices.  Partly because—­I’ve flattered myself—­I talked to him like a Dutch uncle, and partly because he’s cast too much in the same clean-cut mold that you are, to let his natural passions run clean away with him.  He’ll always be more or less a profound egotist.  But he’ll be a good deal more of a man than you, perhaps, think.

“I never used to think much of these matters.  I suppose my own failure at a thing in which I was cocksure of success had made me a bit dubious about anybody I care for starting so serious an undertaking as marriage under any sort of handicap.  I do like Charlie Benton and Linda Abbey.  They are marrying in the face of her people’s earnest attempt to break it up.  The Abbeys are hopelessly conservative.  Anything in the nature of our troubles aired in public would make it pretty tough sledding for Linda.  As it stands, they are consenting very ungracefully, but as a matter of family pride, intend to give Linda a big wedding.

“Now, no one outside of you and me and—­well you and me—­knows that there is a rift in our lute.  I haven’t been quizzed—­naturally.  It got about that you’d taken up voice culture with an eye to opera as a counteracting influence to the grief of losing your baby.  I fostered that rumor—­simply to keep gossip down until things shaped themselves positively.  Once these two are married, they have started—­Abbey pere and mere will then be unable to frown on Linda’s contemplated alliance with a family that’s produced a divorce case.

“I do not suppose you will take any legal steps until after those concerts.  Until then, please keep up the fiction that the house of Fyfe still stands on a solid foundation—­a myth that you’ve taken no measures to dispel since you left.  When it does come, it will be a sort of explosion, and I’d rather have it that way—­one amazed yelp from our friends and the newspapers, and it’s over.

“Meantime, you will receive an invitation to the wedding.  I hope you’ll accept.  You needn’t have any compunctions about playing the game.  You will not encounter me, as I have my hands full here, and I’m notorious in Vancouver for backing out of functions, anyway.  It is not imperative that you should do this.  It’s merely a safeguard against