consciousness over which he could find no way to assume control. He stood in the presence of something that came from outside of his realm and ignored him as the sun and the rain and the simple processes of nature ignored him. "Jane," he said one night, when he was in the Ridge for the first time in many weeks,--a night near the end of the summer when Jeanette and Neal Ward were vaguely feeling their way together, "Jane, mother says that while we've been away Neal Ward has been here pretty often. You don't suppose that--" "Well, I've rather wondered about it myself a little," responded Jane. "Neal is such a fine handsome young fellow." "But, Jane," exclaimed Barclay, impatiently, as he rose to walk the rug, "Jennie is only a child. Why, she's only--" "Nineteen, John--she's a big girl now." "I know, dear," he protested, "but that's absurdly young. Why--" "Yes," she answered, "I was nearly twenty when I was engaged to you, and Jennie's not engaged yet, nor probably even thinking seriously of it." "Don't you think," cried Barclay, as he limped down the diagonal of the rug, "that you should do something? Isn't it a little unusual? Why--" "Well, John," smiled the wife, "I might do what mother did: turn the young man over to father!" Barclay laughed, and she went on patiently: "It's not at all unusual, John, even if they do--that is, if they are--you know; but they aren't, and Jennie is too much in love with her work at school to quit that. But after all it's the American way; it was the way we did, dear, and the way our mothers and fathers did, and unless you wish to change it--to Europeanize it, and pick--" "Ah, nonsense, Jane--of course I don't want that! Only I thought some way, if it's serious she ought to--Oh, don't you know she ought to--" Mrs. Barclay broke her smile with, "Of course she ought to, dear, and so ought I and so ought mother when she married father and so ought my grandmother when she married grandpa--but did we? Dear, don't you see the child doesn't realize it? If it is anything, it is growing in her heart, and I wouldn't smudge it for the world, by speaking to her now--unless you don't like Neal; unless you think he's too--unless you want a different boy. I mean some one of consequence?" "Oh, no, it isn't that, Jane--it isn't that. Neal's all right; he's clean and he is honest--I asked Bob Hendricks about him to-day, when we passed the boy chasing news for the _Banner_, and Bob gives him a fine name." Barclay threw himself into a chair and sighed. "I suppose it's just that I feel Jeanette's kind of leaving us out of it--that is all."