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“Get out! They’ve just been washed. I’ve got a new spread, though. Mother always did love me best!”

“What do you think of that for favoritism! I’m going to kick! It isn’t fair——”

“Tom!”

“Hi?”

“Got my bag in there? Pinkie says he——”

“Heads out, fellows! See who’s coming!”

Rodney could hear the rush to the front windows, followed by applause and cries of “Good old Kitty!” “Breathe deep, Kitty, breathe deep!” “What’s your time, old man?”

Presently the last arrival entered the house and Rodney heard Mrs. Westcott exclaim: “Why, Phineas, how well you look! You dear, dear boy, I’m so glad to see you back again.”

A deeper voice answered, but as the uproar in the other rooms had begun again Rodney heard no more. Desperately he doomed the Norfolk jacket and the trousers that went with it to the trunk again, and began to arrange his shirts in the second drawer of the chiffonier. Rodney was rather proud of his collection of shirts. Most of them had been bought in New York and were things of beauty, especially the negligees, which ran to color combinations of lavender and blue, pink and green and old rose and gray stripes. He was assorting them carefully and approvingly and had for the moment forgotten everything else when footsteps at the doorway caused him to turn his head. What he saw was sufficiently interesting to put the shirts out of mind. Not Mrs. Westcott, who was beaming from the threshold, but the boy who was with her. Rodney, staring wonderingly, thought he had never seen a more remarkable person in his life. And he went right on staring, most impolitely, but quite excusably, until Mrs. Westcott’s voice broke his trance.