That supper was one of the incidents in David Jenison's life always to stand out clear and undimmed. The party of five sat at a table in a remote corner of the dingy little eating-house. At no time were they free from the curious gaze of the people who filled the place, a noisy bumptious crowd of country people making the most of a holiday. The glamour was over them. Some one had recognized "Little Starbright" in the simply clad, demure young girl; the word was passed from table to table. She was stared at and whispered about from the time she entered the place until she left. David, alert and dogged, soon forgot the boorishness of the country-folk, however, in the painful study of conditions near at hand. Colonel Grand, the host, was most affable. More than that, he was tactful. While there was an unmistakable air of proprietorship in his manner, he had the delicacy or the cleverness not to allow it to become even remotely oppressive. He managed it so that the conversation was carried on almost entirely by the two men. Now and then the three palpably unwilling guests were drawn into it, but with such subtlety on the part of their host that they were surprised into a momentarily active participation. Thomas Braddock, cleanly shaven and rather uncomfortably neat as to the matter of linen, was garrulous to the point of noisiness. He confined his remarks to the Colonel, or, in a general way, to the tables near by, with an occasional furtive glance at his wife's set, unsmiling face by way of noting the effect on her. The topics were commonplace enough: the weather, the prospects ahead, the improvements to be made in the show as business got better. Mrs. Braddock, who sat at the Colonel's left, was so noticeably pale and repressed that David wondered if she would be able to go to the end of the wretched travesty without fainting. Unutterable despair hung over her lowered eyelids; it stood out plainly in the lines at the corners of her mouth. Christine seldom looked up from her plate. She sat next to David. He felt the restraint and embarrassment under which the girl suffered. Her cheek went red on more than one occasion when her father's coarse humor offended her delicate sensibilities; she paled under the veiled, insinuating compliments of the other. Once David's hand accidentally touched hers, below the edge of the table. His strong fingers at once closed over hers and for many minutes he held them tight, unknown to any but themselves. The dark lashes drooped lower on her cheeks; he could almost detect the flutter in her throat. The ghastly meal drew to a close. The Colonel, leaning forward, was gazing through half-closed lids at the profile of the woman beside him. His long, white fingers fumbled with an unused spoon beside her plate. Once she had hitched her chair a little farther away from his,--an abrupt proceeding that had not failed to attract David's attention.