“Oh, Lord, no!” simply said the Illinois capitalist. “The girls are used to going out alone with their gentlemen friends, but I’m afraid that these two damned useless foreigners will upset the boat and drown my two girls. I wouldn’t care a rap if they were alone. But these Dago noblemen are no good--at least that’s my experience. I indorsed a draft for one of them that Mommer and the girls dragged up to the house last year. Came back marked ‘N. G.’--I wish to God the girls wouldn’t pick up these fellows.” Alan Hawke hazarded the inquiry “Why do you permit it?” The Chicago pork jammer thrust his hand in his pockets and whistled reflectively. “How the deuce can I help it?” he reflectively answered, “Mother and the girls go in for high society. What’ll you have? You can talk French to this fellow. Now, order up the best in the house,” Alan Hawke laughed and charitably divided the hour of long waiting with the simple-hearted old father. At half-past twelve, with a rush and a flutter, the two young falcons sailed into the main hallway and effusively bade adieu to their limp cavaliers, who slunk away, in different directions, when they observed the disgruntled parent and the heartily amused Briton. “So they brought you home safely?” calmly remarked Hawke, as he watched the happy father gathering his chickens unto his wing. “We brought them home safe,” cutely remarked Miss Phenie. “Those fellows are heavenly dancers, but they are not worth shucks in a boat. I wish we had had you out with us. I like Englishmen!” with which frank declaration Miss Phenie and Miss Genie whisked themselves away to bed, Miss Genie leaning over the banister to jovially cry out: “Don’t you go away till we fix up that Chillon trip.” Major Hawke and Phineas Forbes, Esq., drank a last libation to the friendly god Neptune, the old man huskily remarking: “Say, Major, those are two fine girls, and they will have a million apiece. I want ‘em to be sensible and marry Chicago men, but, they both go in for coronets and all that humbug.” The laughing Major extricated himself from the social tentacles of the honest old boy, mentally deciding to play off Miss Genie against Mad-ame Berthe Louison. “I will give these strange girls ‘a day out.’ It may reduce the nez retroussee my mysterious employer.” And so he dreamed that night that he was an assistant presiding genius of the great pig Golgotha, where Phineas Forbes was the monarch of the meat ax. “Right smart girls, and you bet they can take care of themselves,” was the last encomium of their self-denying parent which rang in Alan Hawke’s ears as he wandered away into the Land of Nod.