"No! there is really something in heredity, after all. Now, you are a Musgrave in every vein of you. It always seems like a sort of flippancy for you to appear in public without a stock and a tarnished gilt frame with most of the gilt knocked off and a catalogue-number tucked in the corner." Patricia spoke without any regard for punctuation. "And I am so unlike you. I am only a Stapylton. I do hope you don't mind my being merely a Stapylton, Olaf, because if only I wasn't too modest to even think of alluding to the circumstance, I would try to tell you about the tiniest fraction of how much a certain ravishingly beautiful half-strainer loves you, Olaf, and the consequences would be deplorable." "My dear----" he began. "Ouch!" said Patricia; "you are tickling me. You don't shave half as often as you used to, do you? No, nowadays you think you have me safe and don't have to bother about being attractive. If I had a music-box I could put your face into it and play all sorts of tunes, only I prefer to look at it. You are a slattern and a jay-bird and a joy forever. And besides, the first Stapleton seems to have blundered somehow into the House of Burgesses, so that entitles me to be a Colonial Dame on my father's side, too, doesn't it, Olaf?" The colonel laughed. "Madam Vanity!" said he, "I repeat that to be descended of a line of czars or from a house of emperors is, at the worst, an empty braggartism, or, at best--upon the plea of heredity--a handy palliation for iniquity; and to be descended of sturdy and honest and clean-blooded folk is beyond doubt preferable, since upon quite similar grounds it entitles one to hope that even now, 'when their generation is gone, when their play is over, when their panorama is withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world,' there may yet survive of them 'some few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy stamp from the disposition of their parents.'" Patricia--with eyes widened in admiration at his rhetoric,--had turned an enticing shade of pink. "I am glad of that," she said. She snuggled so close he could not see her face now. She was to all appearances attempting to twist the top-button from his coat. "I am very glad that it entitles one to hope--about the children--Because--" The colonel lifted her a little from him. He did not say anything. But he was regarding her half in wonder and one-half in worship. She, too, was silent. Presently she nodded. He kissed her as one does a very holy relic. It was a moment to look back upon always. There was no period in Rudolph Musgrave's life when he could not look back upon this instant and exult because it had been his. * * * * * Only, Patricia found out afterward, with an inexplicable disappointment, that her husband had not been talking extempore, but was freely quoting his "Compiler's Foreword" just as it figured in the printed book.