“Oh, am I to have that dreadful creature’s name forever dinned into my ears?” complained Letty. “Isn’t it enough that Father makes us ask him here to dinner, Friday; without _your_ talking forever about him in the little while people leave us alone together? In another minute Aunt Lydia will be pottering in to play propriety. And then--” “And then, ‘Fly from the Aunt, thou sluggard!’ shall be my motto,” finished Caine. “I wish her virtues didn’t oppress me so. I wouldn’t object to her so much, if someone whose vocabulary was as limited as his knowledge of heaven’s _personnel_, hadn’t once described her looks as ‘Saintly.’ She has been trying so hard to live up to the picture, ever since, that it’s a bit wearing on poor sinners like me.” “It’s wicked to be so sacrilegious,” returned Letty, primly. “And I don’t like to have you speak so of my family. After all, she is my aunt.” “Don’t think for a moment I’m blaming _you_ for that, sweetheart,” he protested with an earnestness that left Letty as usual in doubt whether or not he had perpetrated some witticism she ought to have seen. Taking hasty mental review of their talk, she decided he had not, and went on: “And her face _is_ saintly. You know she--” “Perhaps it is,” he acquiesced. “But what a pity Fra Angelico and Rafael couldn’t have seen her! Then we should have had all those cherubs and red-and-gold angels of theirs depicted with thin gray hair parted in the middle, and with gray switches and half-inch eye-glasses.” “You have grown coarse from associating with that Conover man,” pouted Letty. “It’s--it’s indelicate to speak of switches. And it hurts my feelings cruelly to have you abuse the people I love!” The tears, always comfortably near the surface, trembled in Letty’s voice and eyes. Caine, in a fever of remorse, begged forgiveness and tried to put his arm about her. But she drew away with a little hunch of the shoulders. “You’ve spoiled my evening!” she wailed. “First you introduced that miserable man to me and made him frighten me, and now you make fun of--” Footsteps crossing the hall brought her tale of wrong to an abrupt halt. She sat up and furtively mopped her eyes. Tears were so common and so easy a relief to her that normally they left scant mark of their presence. Caine rose and faced the door; the distressed lover merging as by magic into the bored, suave man of the world. Reuben Standish’s widowed sister-in-law glided into the room, diffusing an aura of mild beneficence that struck Caine’s nerves to the raw. Her near-sighted eyes turned as in lofty benediction upon the lovers; her thick glasses diffusing and magnifying the glance until it seemed to embrace all the visible world.