know.  They’ve nearly starved themselves at it; for each claimed the right to take precedence of all the college in leaving the table, and so neither of them ever finished her dinner, but broke off in the middle and tried to get out ahead of the others.  Well, after my first day’s grief and seclusion—­I was fixing up a mourning dress you see—­I appeared at the public table again, and then—­what do you think?  Those three fluffy goslings sat there contentedly, and squared up the long famine—­lapped and lapped, munched and munched, ate and ate, till the gravy appeared in their eyes—­humbly waiting for the Lady Gwendolen to take precedence and move out first, you see!

Oh, yes, I’ve been having a darling good time.  And do you know, not one of these collegians has had the cruelty to ask me how I came by my new name.  With some, this is due to charity, but with the others it isn’t.  They refrain, not from native kindness but from educated discretion.  I educated them.

Well, as soon as I shall have settled up what’s left of the old scores and snuffed up a few more of those pleasantly intoxicating clouds of incense, I shall pack and depart homeward.  Tell papa I am as fond of him as I am of my new name.  I couldn’t put it stronger than that.  What an inspiration it was!  But inspirations come easy to him.

                    These, from your loving daughter,
          
                              Gwendolen.

Hawkins reached for the letter and glanced over it.

“Good hand,” he said, “and full of confidence and animation, and goes racing right along.  She’s bright—­that’s plain.”

“Oh, they’re all bright—­the Sellerses.  Anyway, they would be, if there were any.  Even those poor Latherses would have been bright if they had been Sellerses; I mean full blood.  Of course they had a Sellers strain in them—­a big strain of it, too—­but being a Bland dollar don’t make it a dollar just the same.”

The seventh day after the date of the telegram Washington came dreaming down to breakfast and was set wide awake by an electrical spasm of pleasure.

Here was the most beautiful young creature he had ever seen in his life.  It was Sally Sellers Lady Gwendolen; she had come in the night.  And it seemed to him that her clothes were the prettiest and the daintiest he had ever looked upon, and the most exquisitely contrived and fashioned and combined, as to decorative trimmings, and fixings, and melting harmonies of color.  It was only a morning dress, and inexpensive, but he confessed to himself, in the English common to Cherokee Strip, that it was a “corker.”  And now, as he perceived, the reason why the Sellers household poverties and sterilities had been made to blossom like the rose, and charm the eye and satisfy the spirit, stood explained; here was the magician; here in the midst of her works, and furnishing in her own person the proper accent and climaxing finish of the whole.