"His uncle had a sister to support besides Paddy's mother. His pay as brigadier in the regular service is only fifty-five hundred. He _can't_ have saved much of anything in the past, and he may last a dozen years yet--or more. Even if he does leave everything then to Latrobe, what'll you do meantime? Don't be a fool, Nita, because I was. I _had_ to be. It was that or nothing, and father was getting tired. _You_ heard how he talked." The younger sister was still at the dressing-table diligently brushing her shining, curly tresses. She had regained her composure and was taking occasional furtive peeps at Mrs. Frank, now seated at the foot of the bed, busy with a buttonhook and the adjustment of a pair of very dainty boots of white kid, whose buttons gleamed like pearls. The mates to them, half a size smaller, peeped from the tray of Nita's new trunk. There came a footstep and a rap at the door. "See what it is, Nita, there's a love--I don't want to hop." It was a card--a new arrival at the hotel. "Gentleman said he'd wait in the parlor 'm," said the bellboy, and vanished. Nita glanced at the card and instant trouble stood in her paling face. Silently Mrs. Garrison held out her hand, took the card, and one quick look. The buttonhook dropped from her relaxed fingers. The card read: "Mr. Gouverneur Prime." For a second or two the sisters gazed at each other in silence. At last the elder spoke: "In heaven's name, what brings that absurd boy back here? I thought him safe in Europe." CHAPTER IX. One of the most charming writers of our day and generation has declared that "the truest blessing a girl can have" is "the ingenuous devotion of a young boy's heart." Nine mothers in ten will probably take issue with the gifted author on that point, and though no longer a young girl in years whatever she might be in looks, Margaret Garrison would gladly have sent the waiting gentlemen to the right about, for, though he was only twenty, "Gov" Prime, as a junior at Columbia, had been ingenuously devoted to the little lady from the very first evening he saw her. A boy of frank, impulsive nature was "Gov"--a boy still in spite of the budding mustache, the twenty summers and the barely passed "exam" that wound up the junior year and entitled him to sit with the seniors when the great university opened its doors in October. Studies he hated, but tennis, polo, cricket, riding and dancing were things he loved and excelled in. Much of his boyhood had been spent at one of those healthy, hearty English schools where all that would cultivate physical and mental manhood was assiduously practiced, and all that would militate against them was as rigorously "tabooed."