that made him anxious.

"She is trying to marry him to Marion Hayden."

The rector sat up, almost guiltily.

"But--are you sure she is doing that?"

"Everybody says so. She thinks that if he is married, and there is a
war, he won't want to go if he has a wife." She was silent for a moment.
"Marion will drive him straight to the devil, daddy."

The rector reached up and took her hand. She cared more than she would
admit, he saw. She had thought the thing out, perhaps in the long
night--when he slept placidly. Thought and suffered, he surmised. And
again he remembered his worldly plans for her, and felt justly punished.

"I suppose it is hard for a father to understand how any one can know
his little girl and not love her. Or be the better for it."

She kissed him and slid off the arm of his chair.

"Don't you worry," she said cheerfully. "I had to make an ideal for
myself about somebody. Every girl does. Sometimes it's the plumber. It
doesn't really matter who it is, so you can pin your dreams to him. The
only thing that hurts is that Graham wasn't worth while."

She went back to her little cards, but some ten minutes later the
rector, lost in thought, heard the scratching of her pen cease.

"Did you ever think, daddy," she said, "of the influence women have over
men? Look at the Spencers. Mrs. Spencer spoiling Graham, and making her
husband desperately unhappy. And--"

"Unhappy? What makes you think that?"

"He looks unhappy."

The rector was startled. He had an instant vision of Clayton Spencer,
tall, composed, handsome, impeccably clothed. He saw him in the setting
that suited him best, the quiet elegance of his home. Clayton unhappy!
Nonsense. But he was uneasy, too. That very gravity which he had noticed
lately, that was certainly not the gravity of an entirely happy man.
Clayton had changed, somehow. Was there trouble there? And if there
were, why?

The rector, who reduced most wretchedness to terms of dollars and cents,
of impending bills and small deprivations found himself at a loss.

"I am sure you are wrong," he objected, rather feebly.

Delight eyed him with the scorn of nineteen for fifty.

"I wonder what you would do," she observed, "if mother just lay around
all day, and had her hair done, and got new clothes, and never thought
a thought of her own, and just used you as a sort of walking
bank-account?"

"My dear, I really can not--"

"I'll tell you what you'd do," she persisted. "You