LITMIR.BIZ

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066177867

Table of Contents

       CHAPTER I

       CHAPTER II

       CHAPTER III

       CHAPTER IV

       CHAPTER V

       CHAPTER VI

       CHAPTER VII

       CHAPTER VIII

       CHAPTER IX

       CHAPTER X

       CHAPTER XI

       CHAPTER XII

       CHAPTER XIII

       CHAPTER XIV

       CHAPTER XV

       CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

      There was no denying the fact that Honor Carmody liked the boys. No one ever attempted to deny it, least of all Honor herself.

      When she finished grammar school her mother and her gay young stepfather told her they had decided to send her to Marlborough rather than to the Los Angeles High School.

      The child looked utterly aghast. "Oh," she said, "I wouldn't like that at all. I don't believe I could. I couldn't bear it!"

      "My dear," her mother chided, "don't be silly! It's a quite wonderful school, known all over the country. Girls are sent there from Chicago and New York, and even Boston. You'll be with the best girls, the very nicest——"

      "That's just it," Honor interrupted, forlornly.

      "What do you mean?"

      "Girls. Just girls. Oodles and oodles of nothing but girls. Honestly, Muzzie, I don't think I could stand it." She was a large, substantial young creature with a broad brow and hearty coloring and candid eyes. Her stepfather was sure she would never have her mother's beauty, but he was almost equally sure that she would never need it. He studied her closely and her actions and reactions intrigued him. He laughed, now, and his wife turned mildly shocked eyes on him.

      "Stephen, dear! Don't encourage her in being queer. I don't like her to be queer." Mrs. Lorimer was not in the least queer herself, unless, indeed, it was queer to be startlingly lovely and girlish and appealing at forty-one, with a second husband and six children. She was not an especially motherly person except in moments of reproof and then she always spoke in a remote third person. "Honor, Mother wants you to be more with girls." Then, as if to make it clear that she was not merely advancing a personal whim—"You need to be more with girls."

      "Why?"

      "Why—why because Mother says you do." Mrs. Lorimer did not like to argue. She always got out of breath and warm-looking.

      Her daughter dropped on the floor at her feet. Mrs. Lorimer had small, happy-looking, lily-of-the-field hands and Honor took one of them between her hard brown paws and squeezed it. "I know, but—why do you say so? I don't know anything about girls. Why should I, when I've had eight boy cousins and five boy brothers and"—she gave Stephen Lorimer a brief, friendly grin—"and two boy fathers!" Her stepfather was not really younger than his wife but he was incurably boyish. The girl grew earnest. "Please, pretty-please, let me go to L. A. High! I've counted on it so! And"—she was as intent and free from self-consciousness as a terrier at a rat hole—"all the boys I know are going to L. A. High! And Jimsy's going, and he'll need me!"

      Her stepfather laughed again and lighted a cigarette. "She has you there, Mildred. He will need her."

      "Of course he will." Honor turned a grateful face to him. "I'll have to do all his English and Latin for him, so he can get signed up every week and play football!"

      Mrs. Lorimer did not see why her daughter's finishing need be curtailed by young James King's athletic activities and she started in to say so with vigor and emphasis, but her husband held up his long beautifully modeled hand rather in the manner of a traffic policeman and stopped her.

      "Look here, Mildred," he said, "suppose you and I convene in special session and consider this thing from all angles and then let her know what it comes to—shall we? Run along, Top Step!"

      "All right, Stepper," said the child, relievedly. "You explain it to her." She went contentedly away and a moment later they heard her robust young voice lifted on the lawn next door—"Jim-zee! Oh, Jimsy! Come-mawn-out!"

      "You see?" Mrs. Lorimer wanted rather inaccurately to know. "That's what we've got to stop, Stephen."

      He smiled. "But—as your eldest offspring just now inquired—why?"

      "Why?" She lifted her hands and let them fall into her lap again, palm upward, and regarded him in gentle exasperation. "Stephen, you know, really, sometimes I feel that you are not a bit of help to me with the children."

      "Sometimes you do, I daresay," he granted her, serenely, "but most of the time you must be simply starry-eyed with gratitude over the brilliant way I manage them. Come along over here and we'll talk it over!" He patted the place beside him on the couch.

      "You mean," said his wife a little sulkily, going, nevertheless, "that you'll talk me over!"

      "That is my secret hope," said Stephen Lorimer.

      It was all quite true. He did manage her children and their children—there were three of each—with astonishing ease and success. They amused him, and adored him. He understood them utterly. Honor was seven when her own father died and nine when her mother married again. Stephen Lorimer would never forget her first inspection of him. Nursemaids had done their worst on the subject of stepfathers; fairy tales had presented the pattern. He knew exactly what was going on in her mind, and—quite as earnestly beneath his persiflage as he had set himself to woo the widow—he set himself to win her daughter. It was a matter of moments only before he saw the color coming back into her square little face and the horror

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