Her daughter dropped on the floor at her feet. Mrs. Lorimer had small, happy-looking, lily-of-the-field hands and Honor took one of them between her hard brown paws and squeezed it. "I know, but--_why_ do you say so? I don't know anything about girls. Why should I, when I've had eight boy cousins and five boy brothers and"--she gave Stephen Lorimer a brief, friendly grin--"and two boy fathers!" Her stepfather was not really younger than his wife but he was incurably boyish. The girl grew earnest. "Please, _pretty-please_, let me go to L. A. High! I've counted on it so! And"--she was as intent and free from self-consciousness as a terrier at a rat hole--"all the boys I know are going to L. A. High! And _Jimsy's_ going, and he'll _need_ me!" Her stepfather laughed again and lighted a cigarette. "She has you there, Mildred. He will need her." "Of course he will." Honor turned a grateful face to him. "I'll have to do all his English and Latin for him, so he can get signed up every week and play football!" Mrs. Lorimer did not see why her daughter's finishing need be curtailed by young James King's athletic activities and she started in to say so with vigor and emphasis, but her husband held up his long beautifully modeled hand rather in the manner of a traffic policeman and stopped her. "Look here, Mildred," he said, "suppose you and I convene in special session and consider this thing from all angles and then let her know what it comes to,--shall we? Run along, Top Step!" "All right, Stepper," said the child, relievedly. "_You_ explain it to her." She went contentedly away and a moment later they heard her robust young voice lifted on the lawn next door,--"Jim-_zee_! Oh, Jimsy! Come-mawn-_out_!" "You see?" Mrs. Lorimer wanted rather inaccurately to know. "That's what we've got to stop, Stephen." He smiled. "But--as your eldest offspring just now inquired--why?" "_Why?_" She lifted her hands and let them fall into her lap again, palm upward, and regarded him in gentle exasperation. "Stephen, you know, really, sometimes I feel that you are not a bit of help to me with the children." "Sometimes you do, I daresay," he granted her, serenely, "but most of the time you must be simply starry-eyed with gratitude over the brilliant way I manage them. Come along over here and we'll talk it over!" He patted the place beside him on the couch. "You mean," said his wife a little sulkily, going, nevertheless, "that you'll talk me over!" "That is my secret hope," said Stephen Lorimer.