guiltily sorry for him for many days to
follow--felt guiltier still at the relief she experienced when she had
established that reprieve. The other interview was longer, and took
place days earlier, but it was no more of a delight to Archibald
Wickersham.

Dexter Allison had returned home almost a week in advance of his
daughter, pleading stress of business, but in spite of the demands upon
his time and attention, he had found it impossible to forget the night
of the dinner, when he had watched his daughter's eyes upon Stephen
O'Mara's face.

Allison had never professed a knowledge of women. Like her mother,
Barbara had been many, many times an enigma which he who had often
taken men's souls apart had not dared even to try to solve. Partly
because of that, partly because his observation in other quarters had
taught him the dangerous futility of it, he had lifted his voice
neither in encouragement nor protest of Archibald Wickersham. The two
had grown up from childhood together--Barbara and the man whom she was
engaged to marry--and more than once her father had assured himself
that at least there was a long knowledge of each other's shortcomings
to make for safety in the long run.

His own dislike for Wickersham he had never allowed to sway his middle
course of non-interference. And he had never liked the boy; never
learned to like the man he had grown to be. Underneath Dexter
Allison's jovial exterior there was a cynicism which for hardness would
have made Garry Devereau's worst moments seem mere childish fits of
spleen. Men do not watch other men whimper and beg for mercy--little
rascals who have been nipped in a greater schemer's trap--without
beginning to wonder, soon or late, how much of man is warped and
twisted; and he had been watching Archie Wickersham now for months. He
believed that men's men were not women's men, the oft-repeated epigram
to the contrary. He had eaten too many dinners at which the lion of
the evening who sat on the charming hostess's right hand, was a man of
rank and a thing of ranker repute. But after his first shock at the
realization that his baby was a woman grown, he had promised himself
that her engagement and Wickersham's should be a long one; promised
that the man into whose keeping she was given should have earned the
title in full.

Wickersham's code, in many respects, was above reproach. Allison had
taken pains to ascertain that. But beyond that he did not let hims