"Claire!" He was whispering desperately, "The tea's most done. Oh, my dear. I'm crazy with this puttering around, trying to woo you and having to woo the entire Gilson tribe. Let's run away!" "No; first I'm going to convince them that you are--what I know you are." "But you can't." "Huh! You wait! I've thought of the most beautiful, beastly cruel plan for the reduction of social obesity----" Then she was jauntily announcing, "Tea, my dears. Jeff, you get the tooth-mug. Isn't this jolly!" "Yes. Oh yes. Very jolly!" Jeff was thoroughly patronizing, but she didn't look offended. She made them drink the acid tea, and taste the chalk-like bread and butter sandwiches. She coaxed Bill to go on with his stories, and when the persistent Mrs. Gilson again asked the pariahs to come to dinner, Claire astonished Milt, and still more astonished Mrs. Gilson, by begging, "Oh yes, please do come, Milt." He consented, savagely. "But first," Claire added to Mrs. Gilson, "I want us to take the boys to---- Oh, I have the bulliest idea. Come, everybody. We're going riding." "Uh, where----?" hinted Mr. Gilson. "That's my secret. Come!" Claire pranced to the door, herded all of them down to the limousine, whispered an address to the chauffeur. Milt didn't care much for that ride. Bill was somewhat too evidently not accustomed to limousines. He wiped his shoes, caked with red mud, upon the seat-cushions, and apologized perspiringly. He said, "Gee whillikens, that's a dandy idee, telephone to bawl the shuffer out with," and "Are them flowers real, the bokay in the vase?" But the Gilsons and Jeff Saxton were happy about it all--till the car turned from a main thoroughfare upon a muddy street of shacks that clung like goats to the sides of a high cut, a street unchanged from the pioneer days of Seattle. "Good heavens, Claire, you aren't taking us to see Aunt Hatty, are you?" wailed Mrs. Gilson. "Oh yes, indeed. I knew the boys would like to meet her." "No, really, I don't think----" "Eva, my soul, Jeff and you planned our tea party today, and assured me I'd be so interested in Milt's bachelor apartment---- By the way, I'd been up there already, so it wasn't entirely a surprise. It's my turn to lead." She confided to Milt, "Dear old Aunt Hatty is related to all of us. She's Gene's aunt, and my fourth cousin, and I think she's distantly related to Jeff. She came West early, and had a hard time, but she's real Brooklyn Heights--and she belongs to Gramercy Park and North Washington Square and Rittenhouse Square and Back Bay, too, though she has got out of touch a little. So I wanted you to meet her." Milt wondered what unperceived bag of cement had hardened the faces of Saxton and the Gilsons.