“Never did, eh?  You must come in some time during the week and get a glimpse of it.  We have fine times, I can tell you.  My old head sometimes whirls a bit,” the Judge admitted, “before the week is over, but—­it’s worth it.  Particularly on the night of the party.  The children always have a party on Christmas Eve in the attic.  It’s a great affair.  No dancing-parties nor balls in other places can be mentioned in the same breath with it.  You should see brother Rufus taking out my niece Roberta, and brother Henry dancing with Stephen’s little wife.  The girls accommodate themselves to the old-fashioned steps in great style.”

“I certainly should like to see it,” Richard said, wondering if there were any possible chance of his being invited.

But Judge Gray offered no suggestion of the sort, and Richard made up his mind that the Christmas Eve dance would be a strictly family affair.  “Probably the country relatives are a queer lot,” he decided, “and the Grays don’t care to show them off.  Still—­that’s not like them, either.  It’s certainly like them to do such an eccentric thing as to get their cousins all here and try to give them a good time.  I should like to see it.  I should!”

He found his thoughts wandering many times during the morning’s work to the image of Roberta dancing with the old uncle from the country.  He had never met her at any of the society dances which were now and then honoured by his presence.  Unquestionably the Grays moved in a circle with which he was not familiar—­a circle made up of people distinguished rather for their good birth and the things which they had done than for their wealth.  Nobody in the city stood upon a higher social level than the Grays, but they lived in a world in which the gay and fashionable set Richard knew were totally unknown and unhonoured.

The more he thought about it the more he wished that, if only for a week, he were at least a sixteenth cousin of the Gray family, that he might be present at that Christmas party.  But during the week chance did not even throw him in the way of meeting the various members of the family proper, and when Saturday night came he had discovered no prospect of attaining his wish.  He knew that the guests were to arrive on the following Monday.  Christmas Day was on Saturday; the night of the party then would be Friday night.  And the Judge, in taking leave of him, did not even mention again his wish that Richard might see the guests together.

He was coming out of the library, on his way to the hall door, hope having died hard and his spirits being correspondingly depressed, when Fate at last intervened in his behalf.  Fate took the form of young Mrs. Stephen Gray, descending the stairs with a two-year-old child in her arms, such a rosy, brown-eyed cherub of a child that an older and more hardened bachelor than Richard Kendrick need not have been suspected of dissimulation if he had stopped short in his course as Richard did, to admire and wonder.