Hedin picked up the coat and reverently deposited it in the fur safe.  “It’s a coat fit for a queen,” he decided as he closed and locked the door.  And Jean was the one woman in the world to wear it.  Jean with the red blood coursing through her veins, her glow of health, and the sparkle of her eyes—­McNabb’s own daughter.  “And, yet, I can’t suggest it because—­” Hedin muttered aloud and scowled at the floor.  “I’d have asked her before this,” he went on, “if that Wentworth hadn’t butted in.  Who knows anything about him, anyway?  I’ll ask her this afternoon.”  He stopped abruptly and smiled into the eyes of the girl who was hurrying toward him down the aisle.

“Oh, Oskar, I’ve just got a minute.  I stopped in to remind you that this is Saturday, and we’re going tobogganing this afternoon, and I’ve asked Mr. Wentworth and some of the crowd, and there’ll be four or five toboggans, and it will be no end jolly.  And this is my birthday, and you’re a dear to think of it and send me all those flowers, and I’m going to wear ’em to-night.  Listen, Elsie Campbell is giving a dinner for me this evening and of course you’re not invited because it’s just too funny the way she has snubbed you lately, and there’s a show in town and after dinner we’re going.  Of course it won’t be any good, but she’s making a theatre party of it, and it sounds grand anyway.  And I must hurry along now because I must remind Dad that he promised me a fur coat the day I was twenty-one, and I’ll be back after a while and you can help me pick it out.  Good-by, see you later!” And she was gone, leaving Hedin gazing after her with a smile as he strove to digest the jumble of uncorrelated information of which she had unburdened herself.  “Wentworth, and some of the crowd!  Oh, it will be jolly, all right—­damn Wentworth!”

Old John McNabb looked up from his papers as his daughter burst into his private office and, rushing to his side, planted a kiss squarely upon the top of his bald head.  “I came in to tell you I’m twenty-one to-day,” she announced.

“Well, well, so ye are!  Ye come into the world on the first of March, true to the old sayin’, an’ ye’ve be’n boisterous ever since.  Twenty-one years old, an’ tell me now, what have ye ever accomplished?  When I was your age I’d be’n livin’ in the bush north of 60 for two years, an’ could do my fifty miles on snowshoes an’ carry a pack.”

“Maybe I can’t do fifty miles a day on snowshoes, and I’m sure it isn’t my fault I don’t live north of 60.  But I’m in a hurry; I promised to help Mr. Wentworth pick out a toboggan cap.  I stopped in to remind you that you promised me a fur coat on my twenty-first birthday.”

The old man regarded her thoughtfully.  “So I did, so I did,” he repeated absently.  “This Wentworth, now—­he’s been kickin’ around an uncommon lot, lately.  Tell me again, who is he?  What does he do for a livin’?”