"That's right--and just keep on feeling a thousand years younger." She smiled caressingly, and began to twist a finger in a buttonhole of his coat. "U'm--don't you think, daddy, that such a very young gentleman as you are, such a regular roaring young blade, might--u'm--might----" "Might what, my dear?" "Might----" She leaned forward and whispered in his ear. A hand went to his throat. "Eh, why, is this one----" "I'm afraid it is, daddy--very!" "We've been so upset I guess your aunt must have forgotten to put out a clean one for me." "And I suppose it never occurred to the profound scientific intellect that it was possible for one to pull out a drawer and take out a collar for one's self." She crossed to the bureau and came back with a clean collar. "Now, sir--up with your chin!" With quick hands she replaced the offending collar with the fresh one, tied the tie and gave it a perfecting little pat. "There--that's better! And now I must be off. I'll send around a few policemen to keep the crowds off Aunt Rachel's flower-beds." And pressing on his pale cheek another kiss, and smiling at him from the door, she hurried out. CHAPTER IV DOCTOR WEST'S LAWYER Katherine's refusal of Harrison Blake's unforeseen proposal, during the summer she had graduated from Vassar, had, until the present hour, been the most painful experience of her life. Ever since that far-away autumn of her fourteenth year when Blake had led an at-first forlorn crusade against "Blind Charlie" Peck and swept that apparently unconquerable autocrat and his corrupt machine from power, she had admired Blake as the ideal public man. He had seemed so fine, so big already, and loomed so large in promise--it was the fall following his proposal that he was elected lieutenant-governor--that it had been a humiliation to her that she, so insignificant, so unworthy, could not give him that intractable passion, love. But though he had gone very pale at her stammered answer, he had borne his disappointment like a gallant gentleman; and in the years since then he had acquitted himself to perfection in that most difficult of roles, the lover who must be content to be mere friend.