"Unless you tell a great many small stories," said little, truthful Miss Lydia, "you can't manage it; but your father will just tell one big story, about business or something. Gentlemen can always tell stories about business, and you can't find 'em out. The way we do about headaches. Mr. Smith will say business makes it necessary for him to hurry the wedding up so he can go away to--any place. See?" Mary saw, but she shook her head. "He'll kill Carl," she said again. "No, he won't," said Miss Lydia, "because then everything would come out; and, besides, he'd get hanged." Again there was a long silence; then Mary said, suddenly, violently: "Well--_tell him_." "Oh, my!" said Miss Lydia, "my! my!" But she got up, took the child's soft, shrinking hand, and together in the hazy silence of the summer night they walked--Miss Lydia hurrying forward, Mary holding back--between the iron gates and up the driveway to the great house. Talk about facing the cannon's mouth! When Miss Sampson came into the new Mr. Smith's library he was sitting in a circle of lamplight at his big table, writing and smoking. He looked up at her with a resigned shrug. "Wants something done to her confounded house!" he thought. But he put down his cigar, got on his feet, and said, in his genial, wealthy way: "Well, my good neighbor! How are you?" Miss Lydia could only gasp, "Mr. Smith--" (there was a faint movement outside the library door and she knew Mary was listening). "Mr. Smith--" "Sit down, sit down!" he said. "I am afraid you are troubled about something?" She sat down on the extreme edge of a chair, and he stood in front of her, stroking his white beard and looking at her, amused and bored, and very rich--but not unkind. "Mr. Smith--" she faltered. She swallowed two or three times, and squeezed her hands together; then, brokenly, but with almost no circumlocution, she told him. . . . There was a terrible scene in that handsome, shadowy, lamplit room. Miss Lydia emerged from it white and trembling; she fairly ran back to her own gate, stumbled up the mossy brick path to her front door, burst into her unlighted house, then locked the door and bolted it, and fell in a small, shaking heap against it, as if it barred out the loud anger and shame which she had left behind her in the great house among the trees. While Mary had crouched in the hall, her ear against the keyhole, Miss Lydia Sampson had held that blazing-eyed old man to common sense. No, he must _not_ carry the girl to Mercer the next day, and take the hound by the throat, and marry them out of hand. No, he must _not_ summon the scoundrel to Old Chester and send for Doctor Lavendar. No, he must _not_ have a private wedding. . . . "They must be married in church and have white ribbons up the aisle," gasped Miss Lydia, "and--and rice. Don't you understand? And it isn't nice, Mr. Smith, to use such language before ladies."