At the dinner-table it was the professor who monopolized the conversation, holding forth learnedly and dictatorially upon matters pertaining solely to the Pliocene age, and never once suffering the talk to approach nearer than several million years to the twentieth century. And at the dispersal--only there was no dispersal--the senator took his turn, leading the way to the great wainscoted living-room and persuading Patricia to go to the piano. The young man with the fighting determination in the back part of his brain bided his time. He was willing enough to listen to Grieg and Brahms as they were interpreted by Patricia, but the greater matter was still outweighing the lesser. Further along, when Miss Anners had played herself out, Blount tried to break the obstructing combination. But, in spite of his efforts, the talk drifted back to the dinosaurs and the pterodactyls, and when he finally went away to smoke, he did it alone. The Wartrace Hall den was an annex to the living-room, and through the bamboo _portieres_ he could hear the animated hum of the prehistoric discussion, in which Patricia had now joined as a loyal daughter should. Hoping against hope that the professor would some time go to bed, and that his father would come to the den for his bedtime whiff at the long-stemmed pipe, Blount smoked and waited. But when his patience was finally rewarded, it was not the Honorable Senator who drew the bamboo _portieres_ aside and entered the cosey smoking-room. It was Patricia, and she was alone. "I thought perhaps I should find you here," she said, taking the easy chair at the opposite corner of the fireplace where a tiny wood fire was blazing in deference to the chill of the approaching autumn. "Did we bore you to death with the Pliocenes?" "Not quite," he admitted grudgingly. "But since I hadn't remembered to have myself born six or seven million years ago, I can't somehow seem to galvanize a very active interest in the dead-and-gone periods." "Nor I," she confessed frankly, "though for daddy's sake I do try to. But for us who are living to-day there are so many problems of critically vital importance--problems that the pterodactyls never knew anything about." "I know," returned the young man, half-absently. "I am up against one of them, right now, and I don't know how to solve it." "Will it bear telling?" she asked, and he hoped that the sympathy in her tone was personal rather than conventional.