“There is absolutely no use expecting to talk business with you,” the girl declared.  “Father won’t discuss it with me, and you won’t be serious at all, and I know Mr. Covington is really laughing at me all the time, even though he tries to make me think that he looks upon me as a very business-like young woman.”

“Who is Mr. Covington?” Allen asked, bluntly, inwardly resenting the fact that any one except her father was as intimate with Alice as the words indicated.

“He’s father’s right-hand man in the Consolidated Companies.  If you could once see him and father at work and hear them talk you would understand the fascination of it.”

“Then you like business conversation?” The boy found it difficult to comprehend.

“Better than anything else in the world.”

Allen became really serious.  “If that’s the case,” he said, emphatically, “I’m going to become a man of affairs, just to give you that pleasure.”

Alice clapped her hands with delight.  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

He turned so blank a face to the expectant one he saw before him that the seriousness could no longer be preserved.  The vacuity turned into a smile, and the smile into a broad grin.

“I guess I lose if I have to answer that question now,” he admitted, frankly; “but you keep your eye on Willie and the push-ball, and watch the professor change him into a big roaring captain of industry.  Then you shall talk business with him as much as you like, and he won’t make you feel that he’s laughing at you, as that Mr.—­, what’s his name, does.”

“Good for you, Allen!” the girl cried, really pleased by the clumsily expressed compliment.

“So all is settled now except the pater, and I’m almost launched on my career,” Allen replied.  “Now suppose we take up your case.  What have you been doing all these years?”

“Well,” said Alice, smiling, “the history of my life is yet to be written, but the main facts up to the present are that I have safely passed through school and most of my other childhood diseases; that I had my coming-out ball in New York last winter; that I am happy, and—­most important of all—­that I have Eleanor.”

She took Mrs. Gorham’s hand affectionately in hers as she spoke, and Allen needed nothing more to demonstrate the strength of the bond which existed between the two.  It was not the affection between mother and daughters, or between sisters, or friends, but rather the best of all three merged and purified by the yearning each had felt for that which now each had found.

The conversation during the ride back to the hotel was in lighter vein, in which Allen showed greater proficiency.  Alice’s interest in him was mingled with a disappointment that the years had not made him older and less irresponsible.  She felt herself distinctly his senior, yet she also felt a confidence in his unexpressed ability.  To Mrs. Gorham the passages-at-arms between the two children,