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 seeping out of her eyes. It was a matter of days only until she sought him out and told him, in her mother's presence, that she believed she liked him better than her first father.
"Honor, dear! You—you mustn't, really——" Mildred Lorimer insisted with herself on being shocked.
"Don't you, Muzzie? Don't you like him better?" the child wanted persistently to know. "He was very nice, of course; I did like him awfully. But he was always 'way off Down Town ... at The Office. We didn't have any fun with him. Stepper's always home. I'm glad we married a newspaper one this time."
"Stephen, that dreadful name.... What will people think?"