After dinner, children and dogs and aunties were sleeping all over the house. Vestal’s father, Morton Beehouse, accompanied by his brother Oliver—they were widowers and they had dined at Oliver’s—honored the house by dropping in, bearing unnecessary things in leather and synthetic ivory. Dr. Kenneth was pleased to see how easy his son Neil was with the fabulous Beehouses.

“He’s a sterling young man,” gloated Dr. Kenneth. “He will go far. Maybe it’s time to tell him The Secret.”

He watched his son through the quiet supper, the games of Monopoly and gin-poker and charades, and in mid-evening he said to Neil fondly, “Young fellow, you seem to think so blame well of your trifling house and family, but your old man has to take you up to your den and tell you the facts of life.”

He was a man whose fancies sometimes ran away, and Neil followed him upstairs with a degree of nervous surprise.

Chapter 8

Dr. Kenneth M. Kingsblood (the M. was for his Scotch mother, Jennie McCale) had puttered contentedly through life. He was proud of having once seen Ex-President Herbert Hoover on a train, and of having bought a new X-ray machine, and to him each of his four children was a golden filling. He was more often tired than he should be, at sixty, and his heart fluttered, and he thought that perhaps Mother and he ought to go to Florida next March, when it would be raw in Minnesota.

He was particularly pleased that Neil, the miracle child, was going to be a financier and a civic leader, who would carry out all the reforms—larger schools and a new water-reservoir—of which Dr. Kenneth had dreamed, but which he had been too busy with dentistry and gardening and scrollwork to carry out.

As they sat with knees close together in Neil’s “den,” smoking cigars that harmonized only with Christmas or a dinner for the Governor, Dr. Kenneth puffed:

“Boy, it’s curious, your changing your dog’s name to Prince, because our family might have a special reason to be interested in princes.”

“How’s that, Dad?”

“Well, maybe it’s all foolishness. I like to call it The Secret to myself and here I am acting mysterious—guess the fact is, I don’t quite believe it myself, and I’ll only tell you and not the rest of the family, because you’re the only one that’s got enough imagination so you won’t laugh at me. Just the same, there’s one chance in ten thousand that the story might be true, and if it was, I guess the Beehouses would be mighty proud to be intermarried with the Kingsbloods, and not the other way around.”

“Dad, what is this big mystery?”

“Son, my dad and his dad before him believed that we have sure-enough royal blood in our veins.”

“How do you mean?”

“Just what I say. Maybe we’re kings. No joke. And not any of these French or German rulers, either—Looeys and Ferdinands and that lot, but real royal British kings. Some people think the name Kingsblood is kind of unusual. Well, it is, and for a very good reason. According to my dad’s theory (if he ever really believed it, of which I ain’t too sure), ‘Kingsblood’ was originally a kind of nickname for our forbears, indicating that they had the blood of kings—as you and I have! Now what do you think of that?”