By way of raiment, David, the grip emptied, wore the daintiest tailored walking-gown, short of skirt and displaying silken stockings and patent leathers, with high, slender French heels. David's slim, round, girl-throat suggested the faintest powdering; David's abundant hair was dressed bewitchingly, with little reddish-blond curls straying down about the temples--and had one spent a morning on Fifth Avenue it would really have been rather difficult to find a more thoroughly attractive or better gowned girl than David! Yet, in spite of her charms, Johnson Boller, who had bounced instinctively from his chair, could do no more than stare at David with the general expression of a fish new-snatched from water. Second after second he gaped before his thick: "Who's that?" "That's David!" Anthony said weakly. "The--the boy was a girl?" "It would seem so." "Then----" Johnson Boller stopped, teeth shutting suddenly. He stared at the young woman and he stared at Anthony Fry, who smiled faintly and hopelessly. His face grew red and then purple and then black. "Hah!" he cried savagely. "I've got it! I've got it, you--you----" "Hey?" said Anthony. "I see it now!" Mr. Boller vociferated surprisingly. "You framed this thing up on _me_!" CHAPTER VIII Scorned Anthony's brain, accustomed to the most precise and unexciting of routines, was tired--not nearly so tired as it was destined to become, yet too tired to grasp at once the significance of that flaming countenance. He could no more than stand limply and look at Johnson Boller, as that gentleman, ignoring Mary altogether, strode down upon him with clenched fists. "You did it, but you'll never get away with it!" he cried. "Johnson----" "Never in the world! I've got Wilkins as a witness and----" "Witness for what?" Johnson Boller, albeit he trembled with fury, controlled himself. "Don't try that baby-stare stuff on me, Fry," he said. "I understand now. Last night I thought you were off on one of your eccentric spells, but you were crazy like a fox, you were! But don't think for one minute that Beatrice is fool enough to drop into such a trap!" Anthony himself did a little controlling. "What are you talking about?" he cried. "The thing you've tried to put over, to get me away from Beatrice!" Johnson Boller thundered. "That's enough! Don't deny it! I know you don't approve of matrimony; I know you never wanted me to get married; I know that we haven't traveled around as much this last six months as we did in the twenty years before it--and I suppose you've been lonely, because nobody else in the world would stand for you. But by Heaven, Anthony, I never thought you'd try to break up my family by----" "Try to do what?" Johnson Boller dashed the sweat of fury from his eyes. "I come to stay with you, when Beatrice goes," he said tremblingly. "And although there's no woman in this flat ordinarily, a woman's here last night----"