“Will you bring Dory Hargrave to dinner to-night?  And, of course, don’t let him know I wanted you to.”

“Is that all!” exclaimed Arthur in a tone of enormous relief, which she was too absorbed in her calamity to be conscious of.

“You will, won’t you?  Really, Arthur, it’s very important; and don’t say a word of my having telephoned—­not to anybody.”

“All right!  I’ll bring him.”  A pause, then.  “Father’s just the same?”

“Yes,” she answered, in sudden confusion and shame.

CHAPTER VIII

A FRIEND IN NEED

In the turmoil of his own affairs Arthur forgot his promise almost while he was making it.  Fortunately, as he was driving home, the sight of Dr. Hargrave, marching absent-mindedly along near the post office, brought it to his mind again.  With an impatient exclamation—­for he prided himself upon fidelity to his given word, in small matters as well as in larger—­he turned the horse about.  He liked Dory Hargrave, and in a way admired him; Dory was easily expert at many of the sports at which Arthur had had to toil before he was able to make even a passable showing.  But Dory, somehow, made him uncomfortable.  They had no point of view in common; Dory regarded as incidental and trivial the things which seemed of the highest importance to Arthur.  Dory had his way to make in the world; Arthur had been spared that discomfort and disadvantage.  Yet Dory persisted in pretending to regard Arthur as in precisely the same position as himself; once he had even carried the pretense to the impertinence of affecting to sympathize with Arthur for being so sorely handicapped.  On that occasion Arthur had great difficulty in restraining plain speech.  He would not have been thus tactful and gentlemanly had he not realized that Dory meant the best in the world, and was wholly unconscious that envy was his real reason for taking on such a preposterous pose.  “Poor chap!” Arthur had reflected.  “One shouldn’t blame him for snatching at any consolation, however flimsy.”  In those days Arthur often, in generous mood, admitted—­to himself—­that fortune had been shamefully partial in elevating him, without any effort on his part, but merely by the accident of birth, far above the overwhelming majority of young men.  He felt doubly generous—­in having such broad views and in not aggravating the misfortunes of the less lucky by expressing them.

Dr. Hargrave and his son—­his only child—­and his dead wife’s sister, Martha Skeffington, lived in a quaint old brick house in University Avenue.  A double row of ancient elms shaded the long walk straight up from the gate.  On the front door was a huge bronze knocker which Arthur lifted and dropped several times without getting response.  “Probably the girl’s in the kitchen; and old Miss Skeffington is so deaf she couldn’t hear,” he thought.  He had known the persons and the habits of that household