When Lottie joined her family in the dining-saloon she carelessly explained that Ellen had said she wanted to be alone.  Before the young man, who was the only other person besides the Kentons at their table, her mother could not question her with any hope that the bad would not be made worse, and so she remained silent.  Judge Kenton sat with his eyes fixed on his plate, where as yet the steward had put no breakfast for him; Boyne was supporting the dignity of the family in one of those moments of majesty from which he was so apt to lapse into childish dependence.  Lottie offered him another alternative by absently laying hold of his napkin on the table.

“That’s mine,” he said, with husky gloom.

She tossed it back to him with prompt disdain and a deeply eye-lashed glance at a napkin on her right.  The young man who sat next it said, with a smile, “Perhaps that’s yours-unless I’ve taken my neighbor’s.”

Lottie gave him a stare, and when she had sufficiently punished him for his temerity said, rather sweetly, “Oh, thank you,” and took the napkin.

“I hope we shall all have use for them before long,” the young man ventured again.

“Well, I should think as much,” returned the girl, and this was the beginning of a conversation which the young man shared successively with the judge and Mrs. Kenton as opportunity offered.  He gave the judge his card across the table, and when the judge had read on it, “Rev. Hugh Breckon,” he said that his name was Kenton, and he introduced the young man formally to his family.  Mr. Breckon had a clean-shaven face, with an habitual smile curving into the cheeks from under a long, straight nose; his chin had a slight whopper-jaw twist that was charming; his gay eyes were blue, and a full vein came down his forehead between them from his smooth hair.  When he laughed, which was often, his color brightened.

Boyne was named last, and then Mr. Breckon said, with a smile that showed all his white teeth, “Oh yes, Mr. Boyne and I are friends already—­ever since we found ourselves room-mates,” and but for us, as Lottie afterwards noted, they might never have known Boyne was rooming with him, and could easily have made all sorts of insulting remarks about Mr. Breckon in their ignorance.

The possibility seemed to delight Mr. Breckon; he invited her to make all the insulting remarks she could think of, any way, and professed himself a loser, so far as her real opinion was withheld from him by reason of his rashness in giving the facts away.  In the electrical progress of their acquaintance she had begun walking up and down the promenade with him after they came up from breakfast; her mother had gone to Ellen; the judge had been made comfortable in his steamer-chair, and Boyne had been sent about his business.

“I will try to think some up,” she promised him, “as soon as I have any real opinion of you,” and he asked her if he might consider that a beginning.