she could
not somehow help in this threatened trouble. She had felt an impulse
toward doing something useful. What more useful than assisting to
shield her father from undeserved abuse?...

"It's only me, Cally," said Henrietta Cooney's voice, "or I, as they've
got it in the grammars. I just called up to tell you not to forget the
meeting to-morrow."

"What meeting, Hen?"

"I see I did well to call," came over the wire, on the wings of the
Cooney laugh. "The Saturday meeting at the Woman's Club, cousin, that I
engaged you for the other day. I've just heard that V.V.'s going to
speak, too, which made me want you specially. Don't say no."

"Of course not. I want to go, very much."

The two girls lingered a moment to chat. Henrietta appeared
characteristically cheerful, though reporting half the family sick, and
Cousin Martha Heth quite low in mind with her flatfoot. And Cally's
manner to her poor relation was quite friendly to-night, without any
special effort. Her summer-time suspicion that Hen was actually trying
to "cheer her up" had by now become a certainty (Hen did not know about
Hugo, of course); and which of her own girlhood intimates had done as
much? Further, the words of comfort that the hard-worked stenographer
had said to her, the day she got home from Europe, had recently been
endorsed, as it were, in a most distinguished quarter. A strange thought
this, that there was a point of similarity between Hen Cooney and Mrs.
Berkeley Page....

But when Cally left the telephone she was not thinking of these things
at all. She was thinking that to-morrow she would both hear and see Dr.
Vivian, her father's enemy, the hard religious fellow who could so
easily forget the troubles of others. Her duty on the occasion seemed to
become quite clear to her. She must speak to him, try to induce him to
give up his newspaper articles, or at least to leave her father's name
out of them.

The day of lovers' reunion was somewhat blurred by ending with thoughts
such as these. Hugo, as Carlisle had said, could not pop back after
months, and repossess her mind and heart at a bound. He did it pretty
successfully during the evening, while she entertained Robert Tellford
and James Bogue, 2d, who cordially hated each other, in the
drawing-room. But before she fell asleep that night, Cally's thoughts
had turned more than once to, V. Vivian, of the old hotel which was now
a Settlement. Why had he asked her to go to the Works some