“I don’t care.  I’ve got the right to choose the father of my own children!”

He blushed for this language, a blush he could feel mantling his very toes.  He fled from there.  He saw that the moment was not for light conversation.  And even as he fled he caught the Demon’s prolonged “U-u-mmm!”

Yet when he left in the morning the flapper lurked for him as ever, materializing from an apparently vacant corridor.  He greeted her for the first time without ulterior questioning.  He thought he liked her pretty well now.  And she was undeniably good to look at in the white of her tennis costume; the hair, like Nap’s spots in its golden brown, was filleted with a scarlet ribbon, and her eyes shone from her freshened face with an unwonted sparkle—­decision, certitude—­what was it?  He deemed that he knew.

“Tommy Hollins coming to play,” she vouchsafed in explanation of the racquet she carried.  “Are you glad to go?”

“Glad to see my dog again.”  He smiled as a man of the world.  He was on the verge of coquetry, now that he knew it to be safe.

“We’ll bring him along too, next time.”

“Oh, the next time!” He put it carelessly aside.

“You’ll be out again, soon enough.  I simply know Pops is going to have another bad spell—­in a week or so.”

He could have sworn that the eyes of Breede’s daughter gleamed with cold anticipatory malice.  He shuddered for Breede.  And he wished Tommy Hollins well of his bargain.  Flirt, indeed!  All alike!

“Chubbins!” called the unconscious father from afar.

“Yes, Pops!” She gripped his hand with a well-muscled fervour.  “Oh, he’ll have another in a little while, don’t you worry!” And she was off, with this evil in her heart, to a father but now convalescent.

Marvelling, he walked on to the Demon’s ambuscade.  She pounced upon him from behind a half-opened door.

“I want to say one word, young man.  Oh, you needn’t think I don’t see the way things are going.  I’m not blind if I am seventy-six!  If you’re the tender and innocent thing you say you are, you look out for yourself.  I know you all!  If you don’t break out one time you do another.  I’d a good deal rather you’d had it over before now and put it all behind you—­don’t interrupt—­but you’re sound and clean as far as I can see, and you’ve got a good situation.  I don’t say it couldn’t be worse.  But if you are—­well, you see that you stay that way.  Don’t try to tell me.  I’ve seen enough of men in my time—­”

He broke away from her at Breede’s call.  The flapper jerked her head twice at him, very neatly, as the car passed the tennis court.  She was beginning a practise volley with Tommy Hollins, who was disporting himself like a young colt.

“Chubbins!” he thought.  Not a bad name for her, though it had come queerly from Breede.  For the first time he was pricked with the needle of suspicion that Hollins might not be the right man for the flapper.  Hearing her called “Chubbins” somehow made it seem different.  Maybe Hollins, who seemed all of twenty, wouldn’t “make her happy.”  He thought it was something that the family ought to consider very seriously.  He was conscious of a willingness to consider it himself, as a friend of the family and a well-wisher of Chubbins.