break the shocks which life would have in store for her, to pave the way a little for the woman-world she was so soon to enter.
But there was Kay beside her dainty bed on her knees, saying her prayers, and propped up on the pillow was the Princess Mary, which had been her last doll years ago. Katherine, whose own knees had been shaking anyhow, withdrew quietly and closed the door. She never found the courage to try again. When Kay came home for her first vacation she was still loving but slightly remote, and she had made her first step toward independent action. She took off her pull-on hat with hands that were cold and clammy, and they saw she had cut her hair.
"Oh, Kay!" said her mother, and tears stood in her eyes. But Kay's father only looked at her and said nothing about it. Later on he told her mother that he was afraid she was going to be like Bessie. He said this in the privacy of their bedroom, however, so the servants could not hear. He always had an eye out for the servants, had Henry Dowling.
He was quite sure of this one day a year or so later, after Kay had made her début—oh, yes, she-made her début; frock by Lucille, photographers and society editors, and baskets of flowers which went to the various hospitals afterwards—and had been taken to England to be presented. He came into the drawing room of the town house and found her with a half dozen other young and fluttering creatures, and she was smoking a cigarette. She put it down at once and said: "Sorry, father," but he was surer than ever.
"What we have to remember," he said that night to Katherine, sitting neat and small and subservient before her toilet table, which was covered with chaste ivory appliances, "is that there is a streak of weakness in the blood."
"Not on my side," Katherine ventured. "My people"
"My father had it. He was a strong man in some ways, but in others And Bessie has let her love of adventure, to call it by a polite name, run away with her common sense."
"Kay is not at all like Bessie."
"I'm-not so sure of that," he said obstinately.
It was this mistaken preconception of his perhaps which
