ave done it," she answered.

"Were we never to meet?"

"Never."

"Then I am glad I took matters into my own hands," said he, laughing.

"But you must go to-night--now."

"Impossible."

The subject gave rise to considerable argument, at the end of which,
however, Dudley remained as determined as before, and, as a matter of
fact, he did stay, accepting Farmer Manton's hospitable invitation to
make his house his home. He would stay a week, he said; he had no
immediate pressing engagements, and his delight at being with his old
friend Manton once more was too great to admit of his leaving
immediately upon finding him.

The week proved to be a delightful one. Farmer Manton's buxom daughters
got up one of their celebrated "flare-ups" in his honor, and all the
female population of Stillton was set by its ears. Mabel was not
present, of course,--fortunately, too, perhaps, for her state of heart
and mind was strangely and unnaturably irritable at that time, and his
promiscuous attentions to the various country belles might have provoked
a feeling of which she would afterward have been very much ashamed.

The week was over, yet he lingered. The sea-breezes, he declared, were
just the sort of tonic he needed, and the quiet country-life the very
thing he had been longing for for years.

One day, after an introduction by Farmer Manton to Mr. Moreley, he
enlarged so eloquently upon the benefits of such an atmosphere, and
spoke so feelingly about the ailments to which the latter considered
himself a martyr, that the old gentleman's heart actually warmed toward
him, and he violated all the laws of his monotonous existence and one of
Dr. Nevercure's most specific instructions by inviting him to dinner.

"How did you do it?" asked Mabel, with an incredulous smile, when he
told her down on the beach that afternoon of his unexpected success with
the much-feared parent.

"Oh, it's my fatal fascination, I suppose," he answered exasperatingly.

The weeks that followed were passed much as all of us have passed some
happy weeks of our own lives, and the rest of their story is but the old
one once more repeated.

Dudley persistently maintains to this day that there is much more in a
name than is generally conceded, but his young wife ridicules such
nonsense, saying that it was nothing but a random shot that chanced to
hit the mark. A significant fact is that the boy has been named plain
John, after their never-to-be-forgotten fri