“It is! it is!” she cried, eagerly; and with the recognition made certain the boy shut off his power, and, springing out of the car, was beside her before even the discreet coachman could draw up to the curb.

“I thought I couldn’t be mistaken—­” he began.

“But you weren’t sure,” Alice finished for him.  “You were trying to remember a little girl with a pigtail down her back and horrid freckles all over her face—­now, weren’t you?”

“If that’s the way you really looked, I evidently wasn’t as fussy about such things then as I am now,” he laughed.  “All I remember is that you were the dandiest little playmate I ever had.”

The unexpected compliment caused Alice to turn quickly to Mrs. Gorham.

“This is Allen Sanford, Eleanor; and this, Allen, is my mother, sister, and dearest friend all in one.”

“And my name’s Pat,” added the child, refusing to be ignored and holding out her hand cordially.

The boy was even more embarrassed by the unexpected meeting with the second Mrs. Gorham than to find Alice developed into so lovely and fascinating a young woman.  He had always thought of Alice’s step-mother, when he had thought of her at all, as of a type entirely different from this slender, attractive woman only a few years older than Alice herself.  There was a self-possession about Mrs. Gorham, a quiet dignity, which made the difference in their ages seem greater than it really was; yet, had he not known, Allen would have thought them sisters.  His father was sceptical when he heard of Gorham’s second marriage:  “It’s bigamy, that’s what it is,” were Stephen Sanford’s words.  “Gorham is married to his business.  Everything he touches turns into gold.  Business to him is what a great passion for a woman would be to one man, or a supreme friendship to another; but the lever which moves Robert Gorham is neither love nor steel; it is cold, hard cash.”

All this flashed through Allen’s mind in that brief moment of silence after the introduction, but the thoughts of at least one of the two women had been equally active.  To Alice this chance meeting recalled a time in her life sanctified by the loss of her mother, later made easier to look back upon by the rare sympathy which had existed from the first between herself and the sweet, tactful woman who had come into her life, filling the aching void and awakening her to a new interest in her surroundings.  She and Allen had been “chums” in those early days, and it gratified her to discover that the boy whom she had admired in a childish way had become a young man so agreeable to look upon and so little changed, except in growth, from the lad she remembered.  His six feet of height carried him to a greater altitude than of old, his well-developed arms and shoulders showed a physical strength which his youth had not promised, but his face wore the same frank, care-free, irresponsible and good-natured expression which had made him beloved by all his acquaintances and taken seriously by none.