Forrest leaned back in his chair and surveyed his brother. "A lot you know about training tables--a fellow who spent his two college years cramming for honours," he said, pointedly. "No wonder you look like a pale ghost on such rations. Here comes mother at last." Mrs. Harrison Townsend, in a trailing pale blue gown, her fair hair piled high upon her head, came in with an air of abstraction. "Out late last night?" Forrest asked her, attacking his chop with relish. "A dissipated lot you all look but me. Even Murray would be taken for a chap that got in toward morning. That comes of reading in bed. Now look at me. I was in after the last of you, and I ’m as fresh as a daisy." "For a boy not out of his teens your hours strike me as peculiar." Murray rose slowly as he spoke. He glanced at his mother. She was busy with letters she had found at her plate. Murray limped slowly over to the end of the room, where a great semi-circular alcove, filled with windows, a cushioned seat running round its whole extent, looked out upon the shrubbery and the street beyond. He sank down upon this seat, and gazed indifferently out of the window. Across the narrow side street which led away from stately Worthington Square into a much less pretentious neighborhood stood a big furniture van, unloading its contents before a small brown house. Although upon the left side of the Townsend place lay a fine stretch of lawn, at the right the house stood not more than ten yards away from the side street. Its present owner had attempted to remedy this misfortune of site by planting a thick hedge and much shrubbery, but a narrow vista remained through which, from the dining-room windows, the little brown house opposite could be seen with the effect of being viewed through a field-glass and brought into close range. "What’s that over there in Gay Street?" Olive had caught a glimpse of the furniture-van. "New people moving in? Goodness! How many tenants has that house had? They ’re always moving out and moving in--nobody can keep track of them." Mrs. Townsend, looking up from her letter, glanced out in her turn. "There is certainly no need to keep track of them," she observed. "What your Grandfather Townsend could have been thinking of when he built this house on the very edge of such a fine lot----" "Grandfather Townsend was a shrewd old man, and had an eye to the sale of lots on the farther side of the house when land got high here," was Forrest’s explanation. Five minutes later he was out of the house and crossing the lawn to the stables--a gay and gallant young figure in his riding clothes. From the window of his own room upstairs Murray watched his brother go, feeling bitterly, as he often did, the contrast between Forrest’s superb young health and his own crippled condition, the result of an accident two years before, and the illness which had followed it.