Mrs. Horn pushed back her chair, rose to her feet, and stood waiting to receive the noted 'cellist, without whom not a note could be sounded, and Miss Clendenning took her foot from the fender and dropped her skirts. But it was not Max! Not wheezy, perspiring old Max Unger after all, walking into the room mopping his face with one hand and with the other lugging his big 'cello, embalmed in a green baize bag--he would never let Malachi touch it--not Max at all, but a fresh, rosy-cheeked young fellow of twenty-two, who came bounding in with a laugh, tossing his hat to Malachi--a well-knit, muscular young fellow, with a mouth full of white teeth and a broad brow projecting over two steel-blue eyes that were snapping with fun. With his coming the quiet of the place departed and a certain breezy atmosphere permeated the room as if a gust of cool wind had followed him. With him, too, came a hearty, whole-souled joyousness--a joyousness of so sparkling and so radiant a kind that it seemed as if all the sunshine he had breathed for twenty years in Kennedy Square had somehow been stored away in his boyish veins. "Oh, here you are, you dear Miss Lavinia," he cried out, his breath half gone from his dash across the Square. "How did you get here first?" "On my two feet, you stupid Oliver," cried Miss Lavinia, shaking her curls at him. "Did you think somebody carried me?" "No, I didn't; but that wouldn't be much to carry, Miss Midget." His pet name for her. "But which way did you come? I looked up and down every path and--" "And went all the way round by Sue Clayton's to find me, didn't you? Oh, you can't throw dust in the Midget's eyes, you young rascal!" and she stretched up her two dainty hands; drew his face toward her, and kissed him on the lips. "There--" and she patted his cheek--"now tell me all about it, you dear Ollie. What did you want to see me for?" she added with one of those quick divinations that made her so helpful a confidante. Then, in a lowered voice--"What has Sue done?" "Nothing--not one thing. She isn't bothering her head about me. I only stopped there to leave a book, and--" Mrs. Horn, with laughing, inquiring eyes, looked up from her chair at Miss Clendenning, and made a little doubting sound with her lips. Black-eyed Sue Clayton, with her curls down her back, home from boarding-school for the Easter holidays, was Oliver's latest flame. His mother loved to tease him about his love-affairs; and always liked him to have a new one. She could see farther into his heart she thought when the face of some sweet girl lay mirrored in its depths. Oliver heard the doubting sound his mother made, and, reaching over her chair, flung his arms about her neck and kissed her as if she had been a girl.