"I try to, Kitten," he answered, pulling her ear. "Seaton is too good a man to see go to pieces when it can be prevented. That is why I signalled you to keep the talk off the company and his work. One of the best lawyers I ever knew, a real genius, went to pieces that same way. He was on a big, almost an impossible, case. He couldn't think of anything else, didn't eat or sleep much for months. He won the case, but it broke him. But he wasn't in love with a big, red-headed beauty of a girl, and so didn't have her to fiddle him to sleep. "Well, I'll go get the blanket," he concluded, with a sudden change in his tone. In a few moments he returned and they went into the living-room together. Seaton lay in exactly the same position, only the regular lifting of his powerful chest showing that he was alive. "I think we had better...." "Sh ... sh," interrupted the girl in an intense whisper. "You'll wake him up, Daddy." "Bosh! You couldn't wake him up with a club. His own name might rouse him, particularly if you said it; no other ordinary sound would. I started to say that I think we had better put him to bed on the davenport. He would be more comfortable." "But that would surely wake him. And he's so big...." "Oh, no, it wouldn't, unless I drop him on the floor. And he doesn't weigh much over two hundred, does he?" "About ten or eleven pounds." "Even though I am a lawyer, and old and decrepit, I can still handle that much." With Dorothy anxiously watching the proceeding and trying to help, Vaneman picked Seaton up out of the chair, with some effort, and carried him across the room. The sleeping man muttered as if in protest at being disturbed, but made no other sign of consciousness. The lawyer then calmly removed Seaton's shoes and collar, while the girl arranged pillows under his head and tucked the blanket around him. Vaneman bent a quizzical glance upon his daughter, under which a flaming blush spread from her throat to her hair. "Well," she said, defiantly, "I'm going to, anyway." "My dear, of course you are. If you didn't, I would disown you." As her father turned away, Dorothy knelt beside her lover and pressed her lips tightly to his. "Good night, sweetheart," she murmured. "'Night," he muttered in his sleep, as his lips responded faintly to her caress. Vaneman waited for his daughter, and when she appeared, the blush again suffusing her face, he put his arm around her. "Dorothy," he said at the door of her room, using her full name, a very unusual thing for him, "the father of such a girl as you are hates to lose her, but I advise you to stick to that boy. Believe in him and trust him, no matter what happens. He is a real man." "I know it, Dad ... thank you. I had a touch of the blues today, but I never will again. I think more of his little finger than I do of all the other men I ever knew, put together. But how do you know him so well? I know him, of course, but that's different."