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Rh "Oh, Aunt Effie knows as well as we do that things always run in three's," Eugene responded nonchalantly enough as he moved toward the table; but his light eyes wavered and a slight flush mounted to his sleek golden hair and receded, leaving him more pale than before. He turned to the younger sister, who was so unlike him in type, and asked with a flippancy which the quivering of his rather weak chin belied: "Why so tragic. Nan? It'll be me, not you; and the infernal jinx that is over this house will have to work quick, for next month I'll be twenty-five—"

"Silence!" His stepfather's round reddened face puffed out in anger, and his close-clipped gray mustache fairly bristled. "If you have no heart, at least preserve a semblance of decency and do not jest about—about matters which have bowed all our heads in grief!"

His tone grew husky toward the last, and his slightly prominent blue eyes filled as he turned away.

Nan laid a cool little hand over his.

"Don't mind Gene, father. He's only trying to cover up his own feelings; I know him!" She spoke with infinite tenderness; and it was evident that between the girl and her stepfather a very real affection existed. "Come, shall we wait for the other two?"

"I'm here!" A thin, high, whining voice with an indescribably sarcastic undernote in it replied to the question; and a distorted, humpbacked figure came forward. Randall, the youngest of the Chalmers children, was a boy of about eighteen, and dark like Nan, who was two years his senior; but there the resemblance ceased. Her witching charm seemed in him to be changed to a malevolent humor, and his thin lips were twisted, by past pain perhaps, into