It had been some time since Mrs. Blair had heard anyone speak of taking her father anywhere. Her memory pricked her at once with the recollection that in her mother’s lifetime her father had yielded reluctantly to all pleas for vacations. The children had usually been taken away by their mother--sometimes to hotels at quiet summer places, at other times to houses rented for the season. Colonel Craighill did not always like the places chosen by his wife, but he had never quarrelled with her plans and decisions in such matters. He liked to travel and fell into the habit of an annual trip abroad, going usually alone, chiefly, he declared, for the sea trip. Now, however, Mrs. Blair reflected, everything would be different. Breakfast passed smoothly, and they lingered later in the library. Mrs. Craighill seemed in no awe of her elderly husband. She talked more freely now, and mentioned many foreign places where she and her mother had lived at different periods. Most of them were obscure and unfashionable, and some of them were wholly unknown to Mrs. Blair; but she was dimly conscious that there was cleverness behind this careless sketching of the leisurely foreign itinerary pursued by this young woman and her widowed mother. At the same time the background which Mrs. Craighill created for herself was shadowy; against it she and her mother were as unsubstantial as figures on a screen. There was nothing that you could put your hand on. Vermont, to Mrs. Blair, was even more remote and inaccessible than those French and German towns where winters and summers had been spent by the mother and daughter. Mrs. Blair, in her rapid visualization of their flights, saw them huddled where the pension charges were lightest. Wayne soon called for his runabout and went to the office, as his father had announced that he would remain at home until after luncheon. Wayne had acted becomingly, to his father’s satisfaction and to his sister’s great relief. Mrs. Blair was, in fact, quite proud of him as he said good-bye to her and stood very straight and tall before his stepmother and bade her good morning. He bore the stamp of breeding--she had never felt this more than now--and he could be relied on in emergencies. “Are you all coming over to-night--the children and everybody?” asked Colonel Craighill. “No; you must have your first dinner alone,” Mrs. Blair replied; “but to-morrow night you are coming to us.” “I am dining with Fanny to-night, so you will have a clean sweep,” said Wayne, in conformity with his sister’s earlier instructions.