As the swish of skirts marked the passage of the Van Kamps up the wide hall stairway, the other party swept into the room.

" These simple and, of course, entirely unpremeditated remarks were as vinegar and wormwood to Mrs. Ellsworth, and she gazed after the retreating Van Kamps with a glint in her eye that would make one understand Lucretia Borgia at last.

"What are the Van Kamps paying you for those three rooms?" he asked.

Her eyes swept carelessly over the Van Kamps, and unconcernedly passed on to the rest of the landscape.

"I want to get some of those splendid autumn leaves to decorate our cozy apartments," Mrs. Ellsworth told her husband as they passed in hearing of the Van Kamps.

" There were reasons why this poisoned arrow failed to rankle, but the Van Kamps did not trouble to explain.

The Van Kamps went out to consider the arrangement of the barn.

"Ralph," sternly demanded his father, "you don't mean to tell us that you let the Van Kamps jockey us out of those rooms after all?" "Indeed, no," he airily responded.

The Van Kamps could drink all the water they liked, it made them no hungrier.

Chill cross-draughts whistled in from cracks too numerous to be stopped up, and the miserable Van Kamps could only cough and shiver, and envy the Tutts and the driver, non-combatants who had been fed two hours before.

In the way she handled this son of hers Stella Kamps had been as crafty and skilful and velvet-gloved as a girl with her beau.

The fact that he didn't know it was Stella Kamps' fault.

Stella Kamps kept her age as a woman does whose brain and body are alert and busy.

So Tyler Kamps had travelled up to Chicago.

Stella Kamps, could she have seen it, would have felt repaid for all her years of soap-and-water insistence.

Tyler Kamps was an innocent, but he was not a fool.

He was staring, open-mouthed, at Tyler Kamps.

The first faltering steps in the social career of Gunner Moran and Tyler Kamps had begun.

Stella Kamps had always waited for the sound of his cheerful whistle as he turned the corner of Vernon Street.

Watch Mr. Kamps.

At 9.45 Tyler Kamps and Gunner Moran were standing in the crowded doorway of the ballroom upstairs, in a panic lest some girl should ask them to dance; fearful lest they be passed by.

"Miss Cunningham, this is Mr. Tyler Kamps.

Moran, Mr. Kamps.

Nothing could have been more commonplace or unoriginal, but to Tyler Kamps the brilliance of a Madame de Stael would have sounded trivial and uninteresting in comparison.

" "When do you think the war will end, Mr. Kamps?" He told her, gravely.