Play the Game! | Page 9

her long, limp suede gloves and smoothing them. "I daresay she'll be looking for war whoops and tomahawks. And if it comes to that, we can furnish the former, especially Sunday night."
"Muzzie, did you meet the boy?" Honor wanted to know.
"Yes. He came in for tea with us. A beautifully mannered boy. Very much at ease. We must have him here, Honor."
"Yes, Jimsy's already asked him for Sunday night, Muzzie. Jimsy likes him."
"Well, he may. He has a something ... I don't know what it is, exactly, but he will be good for all of you."
"We'll be good for him, too," said her daughter, calmly. "It must be fearfully dull for him, not knowing any one, and being lame."
He came to supper, a trim young glass of fashion, and it was he, the stranger, who was entirely at his ease, and the "bunch," the gay, accustomed bunch, which was a little shy and constrained. Jimsy stood sponsor for him and Honor was an earnest hostess. He said he enjoyed himself; certainly he made himself gently agreeable to Mrs. Lorimer, to the girls. Honor's stepfather observed him with his undying curiosity. He was a plain boy with a look of past pain in his colorless face, a shadowed bitterness in his eyes, a droop at the corners of his mouth when he was not speaking. For all his two motor cars and his rare old rugs and the portraits of ancestors and his idolized only sonship, life had clearly withheld from him the things he had wanted most. There was a baffled imperiousness about him, Stephen decided.
"A clever youngster," he told his wife, watching him from across the room. "Brains. But I don't like him."
"Stephen! Why not?"
He shook his head. "I don't know yet. But I know. I had a curious sense, as he came limping into the room to-night, of 'Enter the villain.'"
"My dear,--that poor, frail boy, with his lovely, gentle manners!"
"I know. It does sound rather piffle. Daresay I'm wrong. The kids will size him up."
When Carter Van Meter came to tell his hostess good-by, he smiled winningly. "This has been very jolly, Mrs. Lorimer. It was good of you to let me come. Mother asked me to say how much she appreciated it. But"--he hesitated--"May I come in some afternoon when--just you and Miss Honor are here?" He looked wistful, and frailer at the end of the evening than he had at the beginning.
"Of course you may, my dear boy!" Mrs. Lorimer gave him the glory of her special smile. "Come soon!"
He came the next day but one, and as her mother was at a bridge afternoon it was Honor who entertained him. She had just come home from High School and she wore a middy blouse and a short skirt and looked less than her years. "Let's sit in the garden, shan't we?--I hate being indoors a minute more than I can help!" She led the way across the green, springy lawn to the little rustic building over which the vivid Bougainvill?a climbed and swarmed, and he followed at his halted pace. "Besides, we can see Jimsy from here when he comes by from football practice, and call him in. I just didn't happen to go to watch practice to-day, and now"--she smiled at him,--"I'm glad I didn't." There was something intensely pitiful about this lad to her mothering young heart, for all his poise and pride.
He waited gravely until she had established herself on a bench before he sat. "Tell me about this fellow King. Every one seems very keen about him."
Honor leaned back and took a serge-clad knee between two tanned hands. "Well, I don't know how to begin! He's--well, he's just Jimsy King, that's all! But it's more than any other boy in the world."
"You're great friends, aren't you?"
"Jimsy and I? I should say we are! We've known each other ever since--well, before we could walk or talk! Our nurses used to take us out together in our buggies. We were born next door--in these two houses, on the same day. Jimsy's just about an hour older than I am!"
"I have never had many friends," said Carter Van Meter. "I've been moving about so much, traveling ... other things have interfered." He never referred, directly or indirectly, to his ill health or his limp.
"Well, you can have all you want now," said Honor, generously. "And Jimsy likes you!" She bestowed that like a decoration. "Honestly, I never knew him to take such a fancy to any one before in all his life. He likes every one, you know,--I mean, he never dislikes anybody, but he never gets crushes. So, it means something to have him keen about you. If he's for you, everybody will be for you."
"Why do people like him so?"
"Can't help it,"