Play the Game! | Page 2

rather inaccurately to know. "That's what we've got to stop, Stephen."
He smiled. "But--as your eldest offspring just now inquired--why?"
"Why?" She lifted her hands and let them fall into her lap again, palm upward, and regarded him in gentle exasperation. "Stephen, you know, really, sometimes I feel that you are not a bit of help to me with the children."
"Sometimes you do, I daresay," he granted her, serenely, "but most of the time you must be simply starry-eyed with gratitude over the brilliant way I manage them. Come along over here and we'll talk it over!" He patted the place beside him on the couch.
"You mean," said his wife a little sulkily, going, nevertheless, "that you'll talk me over!"
"That is my secret hope," said Stephen Lorimer.
It was all quite true. He did manage her children and their children--there were three of each--with astonishing ease and success. They amused him, and adored him. He understood them utterly. Honor was seven when her own father died and nine when her mother married again. Stephen Lorimer would never forget her first inspection of him. Nursemaids had done their worst on the subject of stepfathers; fairy tales had presented the pattern. He knew exactly what was going on in her mind, and--quite as earnestly beneath his persiflage as he had set himself to woo the widow--he set himself to win her daughter. It was a matter of moments only before he saw the color coming back into her square little face and the horror seeping out of her eyes. It was a matter of days only until she sought him out and told him, in her mother's presence, that she believed she liked him better than her first father.
"Honor, dear! You--you mustn't, really----" Mildred Lorimer insisted with herself on being shocked.
"Don't you, Muzzie? Don't you like him better?" the child wanted persistently to know. "He was very nice, of course; I did like him awfully. But he was always 'way off Down Town ... at The Office. We didn't have any fun with him. Stepper's always home. I'm glad we married a newspaper one this time."
"Stephen, that dreadful name.... What will people think?"
Her new husband didn't in the least care. He and Honor had gravely considered on that first day what they should call each other. It seemed to Stephen Lorimer that it was hardly fair to the gentleman who had stayed so largely at The Office to have his big little daughter and his tiny sons calling his successor Father or Dad, and Papa with all its shades and shifts of accent left him cold. "Let's see, Honor. 'Stepfather' as a salutation sounds rather accusing, doesn't it? 'Step-pa,' now, is less austere, but----"
"Oh, Stephen, dear!" They were not consulting Mrs. Lorimer at all.
"I've got it! It's an inspiration! 'Stepper!' Neat, crisp, brisk. Means, if any one should ask you, 'Step-pa' and also, literally, stepper; a stepper; one who steps--into another's place."
"Stephen----"
"Well, haven't I, my dear?" He considered the three young Carmodys, nine, seven, and five. "Steps yourselves, aren't you? Honor's the top step and----"
"Oh, Stepper, call me Top Step! I like that."
"Right. And Billy's Bottom Step and Ted's the Tweeny! Now we're all set!"
"Yes," said Honor, contentedly. She herded her little brothers out of the room and came back alone. "But--what'll I tell people you are?"
"Why, I think," he considered, "you're young enough and trusting enough to call me A Writer."
"I mean, are you Muzzie's step-husband, too?"
It was the first time she had seen the lightness leave his eyes. "No. No. I am your moth--I am her husband. There is no step there." He got up and walked over to where his wife was sitting and towered over her. He was a tall man and he looked especially tall at that moment. "Her plain--husband. Extremely plain, as it happens"--he was himself again for an instant--"but--her husband." It seemed to the child that he had forgotten which one of them had asked him the question and was addressing himself to her mother by mistake. He seemed at once angry and demanding and anxious, and she had never seen her mother so pink. However, her question had been answered and she had affairs of her own. She went away without a backward glance so she did not see her stepfather drop to his knees beside the chair and gather the quiet woman roughly into his arms, nor hear his insistent voice. "Her husband. The first--husband--she--ever had. Say it, Mildred. Say it."
And now Honor was thirteen and a half, and tardily ready for High School, and there were three little Lorimers, twins and a six months' old single. Stephen Lorimer, who had been a singularly footloose world rover, had settled down securely in the old Carmody house on South Figueroa Street. He was intensely proud of his