But at least we have this, and it is a fitting memory with which to crown our college days."

"Yes!" said Dana fervently, a touch of sadness in his voice. "It's been great! And we'll always know we have each other even though the coming years may separate us by hundreds of miles. You can't ever know how much it has meant to me, especially just at this time. I was lonely, Bruce. Dead lonely! I don't seem to be able just yet to talk about what Dad's been to me these last two years. He was a wonderful man! I don't feel as if he was dead, either. Just gone on ahead! I wish you had known him better."

"So do I!" said his friend earnestly. "But, you know, in a way I did know him better than you understood. I knew him through you. I began to see you were different from a good many of the fellows about us, and studying it I decided it was because you had a most unusual father. I found that you decided most questions in the light of what your father would do if he were in your place. And every time he came to see you I watched him, and wished I had a father like that living. Well, I'm glad I knew him. He left his mark on my young life, too, and I'm glad."

A look of most unusual affection and understanding for two grown men to give one another was the only answer that passed between the two. Then after another silence Bruce said, in a brisk tone, as if the sadness in their thoughts were growing almost too tender for self-control:

"Well, now, Dana, about tomorrow. I don't know what your plans are, but we're due to reach New York at eight o'clock. We can eat breakfast on the train of course, and then I thought we'd better take a taxi straight to my room. You see I have an appointment at ten o'clock, so I won't have much time to waste getting settled. But you can park your baggage there, and be free to come or go at your will. I probably won't be back until around five o'clock, and perhaps you'll know more about your plans when I get back, and of course I'll be able to tell you more about my own. If we both stay east for a time we can look around and see if there are more comfortable quarters than the place I got at random through writing to my friend. But in the meantime it will likely be comfortable enough for us till we know just what we are going to do. Will that suit you, or have you any other suggestion?"

"Suits me perfectly," said Dana with a warm smile. "Only don't carry around the idea that I'm going to sponge on you! It might get such a hold on you that I would have to bat you over the head to get rid of it."

The next morning, according to plan, the two parted at the pleasant downtown rooming house in a plain district, Bruce going to his prospective job, and Dana left alone again, with his big problem on his hands. Going to take a message to a mother and sister he did not know, from a father who had gone away from this world forever!

Chapter 2

Corinne Barron in flashy embroidered satin pajamas of gaudy colors lounged on an extremely modernesque couch of white velvet in a bleak living room of her mother's ornate apartment, reading a movie magazine.

Her full name was Corinne Coralie. And when her mother had married Dinsmore Collette some years after her divorce from Jerrold Barron, Corinne, still a little girl, took her stepfather's name, leaving out the Coralie, which she felt to be superfluous, and writing it Corinne Collette. But when that stepfather took himself away from them without the usual formalities, the girl was strongly tempted to discard his name and go back to her own father's name. If her mother had not objected so furiously she would have done so. But Lisa reasoned that there would be no other name for her to take except Barron, and Lisa did not care to bring the name of Barron into the picture again. So she was known as Corinne Collette.

The room in which she was sitting was so modern that it was fairly uninviting.