"But," continued Dorothy, "suppose one day I was looking very plain and unattractive, would you tell me of it?" "You couldn't." This was said with such an air of conviction that Dorothy felt her cheeks burn, and she lowered her eyes. John Dene, she decided, could be extremely embarrassing. His conversation seemed to consist of one-pound notes: he had no small change. For some time she remained silent, again leaving the conversation to John Dene and her mother. He was telling her something of his early struggles and adventures, first in Canada, then in America and finally in Canada again. How he had lost both his parents when a child, and had been adopted by an uncle and aunt who, apparently, made no attempt to disguise the fact that they regarded him as an expensive nuisance. At twelve he had run away, determined to carve out his own career, "And I did it," he concluded. "But how did you manage to do it in the time?" asked Mrs. West. "I was thirty-seven last fall. I began at twelve. You can do a rare lot in twenty-five years--if you don't happen to have too many ancestors hanging around," he added grimly. "I think you are very wonderful," was Mrs. West's comment, and John Dene knew she meant it. "If I'd been in this country," he remarked with a return of his old self-assertiveness, "I'd probably be driving a street-car, or picking up cigarette-stubs." "Why?" enquired Mrs. West, puzzled at the remark. "You can't jump over a wall when you're wearing leaden soles on your boots," was the terse rejoinder. "And haven't you sometimes missed not having a mother?" enquired Mrs. West gently, tears in her sympathetic eyes at the thought of this solitary man who had never known the comforts of a home. "She would have been proud of you." "Would she?" he enquired simply, as he crumbled his cake and threw it to a flurry of birds that was hopefully fluttering on the fringe of the tables. "A son's success means more to a mother than anything else," said Mrs. West. "I seem to have been hustling around most of my time," said John Dene. "I'm always working when I'm not asleep. Perhaps I haven't felt it as much----" He left the sentence uncompleted; but there was a look in his eyes that was not usually there. Mrs. West sighed with all a mother's sympathy for a lonely man. "Do you like birds, Mr. Dene?" asked Dorothy. "Why, sure," he replied, "I like all animals. That's what I don't understand about you over here," he continued. "But we love animals," said Mrs. West. "I mean stag and fox-hunting." There was a hard note in his voice. "If I had a place in this country and anyone came around hunting foxes on my land, there'd be enough trouble to keep the whole place from going to sleep for the next month." "What should you do?" enquired Dorothy wickedly. "Well, if anything had to be killed that day it wouldn't be the fox." "I'm afraid you wouldn't be very popular with your neighbours," said Dorothy.