"You don't realize," declared Brown, in answer to this assertion and the general assenting, laugh which followed it, backed by Atchison's. "Hear, hear!" "that the group you all make in the light of my fire is a picture far ahead of anything in Atchison's collection. I should be an unappreciative host indeed if I didn't make the most of it."
"What an artful speech!" laughed Mrs. Brainard, lifting fine eyes in an attempt to make out the shadowy face above her. "It's well calculated to distract our attention from the fact that you are not changing your position by so much as the moving of an arm. We came to see you, man, not to show ourselves to you."
"We came to cheer his loneliness," put in Hugh Breckenridge with a peculiar, cynical-sounding little laugh for which he was famous. "And we find him up to his neck in boys. Jove! How do you stand their dirty hands, Don? That's what would get me, no matter how good my intentions were."
"Those hands were every pair scrubbed to a finish, to-day, in honour of
Thanksgiving. Do you think we have no manners here?" retorted Brown.
"That wasn't the dinner party you wrote me of when you refused to come to mine, was it, Don?" questioned his sister.
"No. This was an after-dinner party, partaking of the 'lavin's,'" Brown explained. "The real one was over an hour before."
"Do tell us about it. Did you enjoy it? Won't you describe your guests?"
Mrs. Brainard spoke eagerly.
"With pleasure. The Kelceys are my next-door neighbours on the left. Mrs. Kelcey is pure gold—in the rough. Her husband is not quite her equal, but he knows it and strives to be worthy of her. The Murdisons, on the other side, are—Scotch granite—splendid building material. Old Mr. Benson, the watchmaker, is—well, he's full-jewelled. The others I perhaps can't characterize quite so easily, but among them I find several uncut gems of the semi-precious varieties. Of course there's considerable commonplace material—if you can ever call the stuff of which human beings are made commonplace, which I doubt. There's more or less copper and brass, with a good bit of clay—as there is in all of us. And a deal of a more spiritual element which can't be measured or described, but which makes them all worth knowing."
He had spoken in a thoughtful tone, as if he took Mrs. Brainard's question seriously and meant to answer it in the same way. A moment's silence followed. Then Doctor Brainard said slowly:
"I suppose you don't find those priceless elements among the people of your abandoned parish. Down there we're all copper and clay, eh?"