“Hullo, Mr. Lanley,” he said, stooping to kiss his mother with the casual affection of the domesticated male.  “You have my job.”

“It is a great pleasure to be of any service,” said Mr. Lanley.

“It was in a terrible state, it seems, Pete,” said his mother.

“She makes her fours just like sevens, doesn’t she?” observed Pete.

“I did not notice the similarity,” replied Mr. Lanley.  He glanced at Mrs. Wayne, however, and enjoyed his denial almost as much as he had enjoyed the discovery that the Wilsey ancestor had not been a Signer.  He felt that somehow, owing to his late-nineteenth-century tact, the breach between him and Pete had been healed.

“Mr. Lanley is going to stay and dine with me,” said Mrs. Wayne.

Pete looked a little grave, but his next sentence explained the cause of his anxiety.

“Wouldn’t you like me to go out and get something to eat, Mother?”

“No, no,” answered his mother, firmly.  “This time there really is something in the house quite good.  I don’t remember what it is.”

And then Pete, who felt he had done his duty, went off to dress.  Soon, however, his voice called from an adjoining room.

“Hasn’t that woman sent back any of my collars, Mother dear?”

“O Pete, her daughter got out of the reformatory only yesterday,” Mrs. Wayne replied.  Lanley saw that the Wayne housekeeping was immensely complicated by crime.  “I believe I am the only person in your employ not a criminal,” he said, closing the books.  “These balance now.”

“Have I anything left?”

“Only about a hundred and fifty.”

She brightened at this.

“Oh, come,” she said, “that’s not so bad.  I couldn’t have been so terribly overdrawn, after all.”

“You ought not to overdraw at all,” said Mr. Lanley, severely.  “It’s not fair to the bank.”

“Well, I never mean to,” she replied, as if no one could ask more than that.

Presently she left him to go and dress for dinner.  He felt extraordinarily at home, left alone like this among her belongings.  He wandered about looking at the photographs—­photographs of Pete as a child, a photograph of an old white house with wisteria-vines on it; a picture of her looking very much as she did now, with Pete as a little boy, in a sailor suit, leaning against her; and then a little photograph of her as a girl not much older than Mathilde, he thought—­a girl who looked a little frightened and awkward, as girls so often looked, and yet to whom the French photographer—­for it was taken in the Place de la Madeleine—­had somehow contrived to give a Parisian air.  He had never thought of her in Paris.  He took the picture up; it was dated May, 1884.  He thought back carefully.  Yes, he had been in Paris himself that spring, a man of thirty-three or so, feeling as old almost as he did to-day, a widower with his little girl.  If only they might have met then, he and that serious, starry-eyed girl in the photograph!