Cora sprang to her feet.  “You’re not smoking,” she said to Corliss hurriedly, as upon a sudden discovery.  “Let me get you some matches.”

She had entered the house before he could protest, and Hedrick, looking down the hall, was acutely aware that she dived desperately into the library.  But, however tragic the cry for justice she uttered there, it certainly was not prolonged; and the almost instantaneous quickness of her reappearance upon the porch, with matches in her hand, made this one of the occasions when her brother had to admit that in her own line Cora was a miracle.

“So thoughtless of me,” she said cheerfully, resuming her seat.  She dropped the matches into Mr. Corliss’s hand with a fleeting touch of her finger-tips upon his palm.  “Of course you wanted to smoke.  I can’t think why I didn’t realize it before.  I must have——­”

A voice called from within, commanding in no, uncertain tones.

“Hedrick!  I should like to see you!” Hedrick rose, and, looking neither to the right nor, to the left, went stonily into the house, and appeared before the powers.

“Call me?” he inquired with the air of cheerful readiness to proceed upon any errand, no matter how difficult.

Mr. Madison countered diplomacy with gloom.

“I don’t know what to do with you.  Why can’t you let your sister alone?”

“Has Laura been complaining of me?”

“Oh, Hedrick!” said Mrs. Madison.

Hedrick himself felt the justice of her reproof:  his reference to Laura was poor work, he knew.  He hung his head and began to scrape the carpet with the side of his shoe.

“Well, what’d Cora say I been doing to her?”

“You know perfectly well what you’ve been doing,” said Mr. Madison sharply.

“Nothing at all; just sitting on the steps.  What’d she say?”

His father evidently considered it wiser not to repeat the text of accusation.  “You know what you did,” he said heavily.

“Oho!” Hedrick’s eyes became severe, and his sire’s evasively shifted from them.

“You keep away from the porch,” said the father, uneasily.

“You mean what I said about Ray Vilas?” asked the boy.

Both parents looked uncomfortable, and Mr. Madison, turning a leaf in his book, gave a mediocre imitation of an austere person resuming his reading after an impertinent interruption.

“That’s what you mean,” said the boy accusingly.  “Ray Vilas!”

“Just you keep away from that porch.”

“Because I happened to mention Ray Vilas?” demanded Hedrick.

“You let your sister alone.”

“I got a right to know what she said, haven’t I?”

There was no response, which appeared to satisfy Hedrick perfectly.  Neither parent met his glance; the mother troubled and the father dogged, while the boy rejoiced sternly in some occult triumph.  He inflated his scant chest in pomp and hurled at the defeated pair the well-known words: