Meanwhile the laws of trade must be carried on, and others, to keep their rights, sift and settle Adam Lawton’s affairs as far as possible, before Brooke could learn what they as a family had or did not have and by it measure what might be done. For neither mother nor daughter knew of the extent of this final venture of all, and beyond keeping domestic accounts and holding a joint key with her father to a box in an up-town safe deposit company, where family papers and some securities belonging to her mother were kept, Brooke was no partner in her father’s affairs. In fact one of the things, Mr. Dean said, that had hurried the crisis and complicated its untangling was the habit that Adam Lawton had formed of holding aloof from the advice and confidence of his fellows. * * * * * Later in the evening, when the Cub emerged from Brooke’s room, he found that she had taken the nurse’s place by her father and the library was empty. While he walked about the room restlessly, alternately enjoying his comparative liberty or wondering what he had best do about his dog, something led him to cross the hall and turn the angle to the den, where, to his intense astonishment, amid a blaze of lights, that contrasted vividly with the semi-dark silence of the other rooms, was Lucy Dean, in the great leather-covered Morris chair, upon one arm of which sat the bull pup, whose persuasive pink tongue had just succeeded at the moment he entered in touching Lucy’s nose in affectionate salute. “Brooke told me about the dear, and I went down and fished her out of an old box, where they had bedded her, just in time to save her from spoiling her figure with a whole bowl of oatmeal and soup,” said Lucy, in answer to the question on the Cub’s face. “You’ve got to be very particular about feeding her, remember, or she’ll grow groggy and sleepy and wheeze, instead of keeping her sporting blood up—” and Lucy held out her unoccupied left hand to the boy, who, after the callowness and fervour of youth, regarded this friend of his sister’s, eight years his senior, with her dash and vim, as the combination of everything admirable and adorable and himself her equal in years. “No, I’m not going to kiss you this time,” she continued, leaning back in the chair, as he half stooped behind her; “I’ve just transferred that to Pam here. Why? Because you’ve gained a year and two inches since I saw you when you came home last Christmas—and sixteen is a good stile to stop at. Then hands off, young man, and no kisses outside the family until you are twenty-one and able to shoulder your own responsibilities.” The Cub growled out something half sulkily.