was difficult to
please; or that he studied with a criticism quite as jealous as Zenas
Henry's own every male who crossed the girl's path?

Yet with all his idealism Willie was a keen observer of life, and from
the first moment of their meeting he had detected in Robert Morton
qualities more nearly akin to his standards than he had discovered in
any of the other outsiders who had come into the hamlet. There was,
for example, the son of the Farwells who owned the great colonial
mansion on the point,--Billy Farwell, with his racing car and his dogs
and his general air of elegance and idleness. Delight had known him
since she was a child. And there was Jasper Carlton, the scholarly
scientist, years the girl's senior, who annually came to board with the
Brewsters during the vacation months. Both of these men paid court to
the village beauty, Billy with a half patronizing, half audacious
assurance born of years of intimacy; and the professor with that
old-fashioned reserve and deference characteristic of the older
generation. There were days when the two caused Willie such
perturbation of spirit that he would willingly have knocked their heads
together or cheerfully have wrung their necks.

Delight unhesitatingly acknowledged that she liked both of them and
harmlessly coquetted first with the one, then with the other, until the
old inventor was at his wit's end to fathom which she actually favored
or whether she seriously favored either of them. Yet irreproachable as
were these suitors, to place a man of Bob Morton's attributes in the
same category with them seemed absurd. Why, he was head and shoulders
above them mentally, morally, physically,--from whichever angle one
viewed him. Moreover, blood will tell, and was he not of the fine old
Morton stock? Whatever the Carlton forbears might be, young Farwell's
ancestry was not an enviable one. Yes, Willie had settled Delight's
future to his entire satisfaction and for nights had been sleeping
peacefully, confident that with such a husband as Robert Morton her
happiness and good fortune would be assured.

And then, like a thunderbolt out of the heavens, had come this Cynthia
Galbraith with her fetching clothes, her affluence and her air of
proprietorship! By what right had she acquired her monopoly of Bob
Morton, and was its exclusiveness gratifying or irksome to its
recipient? Might not this strange young man, concerning whom Willie
was forced to own he actually