"There is, you know, a small salary that goes with this being adopted business," he remarked casually a few seconds later. "Your Aunts Gertrude and Beulah and Margaret, and your three stalwart uncles aforesaid, are not the kind of people who have been brought up to expect something for nothing. They don't expect to adopt a perfectly good orphan without money and without price, merely for the privilege of experimentation. No, indeed, an orphan in good standing of the best New England extraction ought to exact for her services a salary of at least fifteen dollars a month. I wouldn't consent to take a cent less, Eleanor." "Wouldn't you?" the child asked uncertainly. She sat suddenly erect, as if an actual burden had been dropped from her shoulders. Her eyes were not violet, David decided, he had been deceived by the depth of their coloring; they were blue, Mediterranean blue, and her lashes were an inch and a half long at the very least. She was not only pretty, she was going to be beautiful some day. A strange premonition struck David of a future in which this long-lashed, stoic baby was in some way inextricably bound. "How old are you?" he asked her abruptly. "Ten years old day before yesterday." They had been making their way through the Park; the searer, yellower Park of late November. It looked duller and more cheerless than David ever remembered it. The leaves rattled on the trees, and the sun went down suddenly. "This is Central Park," he said. "In the spring it's very beautiful here, and all the people you know go motoring or driving in the afternoon." He bowed to his mother's milliner in a little French runabout. The Frenchman stared frankly at the baby blue tam-o'-shanter and the tangled golden head it surmounted. "Joseph could make you a peachy tam-o'-shanter looking thing of blue velvet; I'll bet I could draw him a picture to copy. Your Uncle David, you know, is an artist of a sort." For the first time since their incongruous association began the child met his smile; her face relaxed ever so little, and the lips quivered, but she smiled a shy, little dawning smile. There was trust in it and confidence. David put out his hand to pat hers, but thought better of it. "Eleanor," he said, "my mother knows our only living Ex-president, and the Countess of Warwick, one Vanderbilt, two Astors, and she's met Sir Gilbert Parker, and Rudyard Kipling. She also knows many of the stars and satellites of upper Fifth Avenue. She has, as well, family connections of so much weight and stolidity that their very approach, singly or in conjunction, shakes the earth underneath them.--I wish we could meet them all, Eleanor, every blessed one of them." CHAPTER II THE COOPERATIVE PARENTS "I wonder how a place like this apartment will look to her," Beulah said thoughtfully. "I wonder if it will seem elegant, or cramped to death. I wonder if she will take to it kindly, or with an ill concealed contempt for its limitations."