“She couldn’t possibly have been more lonely than I. Next time I’ll take her with me!” was the emphatic response.

Then the whole group swept by the library door, down the hall, and into the room of the great fireplace.  Nobody looked his way, and Richard Kendrick had one swift view of them all.  Vigorous young men, graceful young women, a child or two, the mother of them all on the arm of her husband—­there were plenty to choose from, but he could not find the one he looked for.  Then, quite by itself, another figure flashed past him.  He had a glimpse of a dusky mass of hair, of a piquant profile, of a round arm bared to the elbow.  As the figure passed the hat-tree he saw the arm reach out and catch the rose-coloured scarf, flinging it over one shoulder.  Then the whole vision had vanished, and he stood alone in the library doorway, with Judge Gray saying behind him:  “I cannot find the clipping.  I will mail it to your grandfather when I come upon it.”

“I knew that scarf was hers,” Richard was thinking as he went out into the night by way of the rear door, Judge Gray having accompanied him to the threshold and given him a cordial hand of farewell.  What a voice!  She could make a fortune with it on the stage, if she couldn’t sing a note.  The stage!  What had the stage to do with people who lived together in a place like that?

He looked curiously back at the house as he went down the box-bordered path which led, curving, from it to the street.  It was obviously one of the old-time mansions of the big city, preserved in the midst of its grounds in a neighbourhood now rampant with new growth.  It was outside, on this chill October night, as hospitable in appearance as it was inside; there was hardly a window which did not glow with a mellow light.  As Richard drove down the street, he was recalling vividly the picture of the friendly-looking hall with its faded Turkey carpet worn with the tread of many rushing feet, its atmosphere of welcoming warmth—­and the rose-hued scarf flung over the dull masculine belongings as if typifying the fashion in which the women of the household cast their bright influence over the men.

It suddenly occurred to Richard Kendrick that if he had lived in such a home even until he went away to school, if he had come back to such a home from college and from the wanderings over the face of the earth with which he had filled in his idle days since college was over, he should be perhaps a better, surely a different, man than he was now.

* * * * *

Louis Gray, coming into the hall precisely as Richard Kendrick, again enveloped in his muddy motoring coat, was releasing Judge Gray’s hand and disappearing into the night, looked curiously after the departing figure.  His sister Roberta, following him into the hall a moment after, rose-coloured scarf still drifting across white-clad shoulder, was in time to receive his comment: