his back.

"Last night at the dance," she continued, "I heard a woman saying that I
didn't look the least bit like Paul, and I wondered who he was."

"Perhaps some one in her own family," said Josiah at last.

"Must have been," Mary carelessly nodded. They went on chatting and
presently Josiah was himself again.

"What are you going to do about Walter Cabot?" he asked, looking at her
with love in his sombre eyes.

Mary made a helpless gesture.

"Has he asked you yet?"

"Yes," she said in a muffled voice, "--often."

"Why don't you take him?"

Again Mary made her helpless gesture and, for a long moment she too was
on the point of opening her heart. But again heredity, training and
age-old tradition stood between them, finger on lip.

"I sometimes have such a feeling that I want to do something in the
world," she nearly told him. "And if I married Wally, it would spoil it
all. I sometimes have such dreams--such wonderful dreams of doing
something--of being somebody--and I know that if I married Wally I should
never be able to dream like that again--"

As you can see, that isn't the sort of a thing which a girl can very well
say to her father--or to any one else for that matter, except in fear and
hesitation.

"The way I am now," she nearly told him, "there are ever so many things
in life that I can do--ever so many doors that I can open. But if I marry
Wally, every door is locked but one. I can be his wife; that's all."

Obviously again, you couldn't expect a girl to speak like that,
especially a girl with dreamy eyes and shy. Nevertheless those were the
thoughts which often came to her at night, after she had said her prayers
and popped into bed and lay there in the dark turning things over in her
mind.

One night, for instance, after Wally had left earlier than usual, she
lay with her head snuggled on the pillow, full of vague dreams and
visions--vague dreams of greatness born of the sunsets and stars and
flowers--vague visions of proving herself worthy of the heritage of life.

"I don't think it's a bit fair," she thought. "As soon as a woman
marries--well, somehow, she's through. But it doesn't seem to make any
difference to the man. He can go right on doing the big things--the great
things--"

She stopped, arrested by the sound of a mandolin under her window. The
next moment the strains of Wally's tenor entered the room, mingled with
the moonlight and the scent of the syringa bush. A murmuring, de