“Ann,” Tembarom ventured, “if I go to Temple Barholm and try it a year and learn all about it---” “It would take more than a year,” said Ann. “Don't make it two,” Tembarom pleaded. “I'll sit up at night with wet towels round my head to learn; I'll spend fourteen hours a day with girls that look like the pictures in the `Ladies' Pictorial', or whatever it is in England; I'll give them every chance in life, if you'll let me off afterward. There must be another lost heir somewhere; let's dig him up and then come back to little old New York and be happy. Gee! Ann,”--letting himself go and drawing nearer to her,--“how happy we could be in one of those little flats in Harlem!” She was a warm little human thing, and a tender one, and when he came close to her, glowing with tempestuous boyish eagerness, her eyes grew bluer because they were suddenly wet, and she was obliged to move softly back. “Yes,” she said; “I know those little flats. Any one could---” She stopped herself, because she had been going to reveal what a home a woman could make in rooms like the compartments in a workbox. She knew and saw it all. She drew back a little again, but she put out a hand and laid it on his sleeve. “When you've had quite time enough to find out, and know what the other thing means, I'll do whatever you want me to do,” she said. “It won't matter what it is. I'll do it.” “She means that,” Hutchinson mumbled unsteadily, turning aside. “Same as her mother would have meant it. And she means it in more ways than one.” And so she did. The promise included quite firmly the possibility of not unnatural changes in himself such as young ardor could not foresee, even the possibility of his new life withdrawing him entirely from the plane on which rapture could materialize on twenty dollars a week in a flat in Harlem. CHAPTER IX Type as exotic as Tembarom's was to his solicitor naturally suggested problems. Mr. Palford found his charge baffling because, according to ordinary rules, a young man so rudimentary should have presented no problems not perfectly easy to explain. It was herein that he was exotic. Mr. Palford, who was not given to subtle analysis of differences in character and temperament, argued privately that an English youth who had been brought up in the streets would have been one of two or three things. He would have been secretly terrified and resentful, roughly awkward and resentful, or boastfully delighted and given to a common youth's excitedly common swagger at finding himself suddenly a “swell.” This special kind of youth would most assuredly have constantly thought of himself as a “swell” and would have lost his head altogether, possibly with results in the matter of conduct in public which would have been either maddening or crushing to the spirit of a well-bred, mature-minded legal gentleman temporarily thrust into the position of bear-leader.