"Excuse me, but, perhaps you do not know, that is--is--my father." Stammering forth these words, she at the same time turned very red in the face. This was slightly awkward, or would have been to another. As for this young man, he did not mind a little thing like that. "I did not know it," he told the girl, unruffled; "I crave your pardon. The fact is, it is an habitual failing of mine to make sport of fat people. The lubberly clumsiness of a huge corporation of human flesh is to me so irresistibly comic! My mother tells me a dreadful day of retribution is coming--a day, wherein I shall be fifty and fat, and a fit subject for the ridicule of others." "I cannot discern the foreshadows of such a day," replied the girl, glancing with unconscious approbation at the admirable outlines of a figure whose proportions were well-nigh faultless. She fingered nervously at her bonnet-strings, smiled a panic-stricken little smile, broke out into a cold sweat of fearful expectation, and through all the horrors of the situation, tried her best to emulate the young man's inimitable air of cultured composure. He got up at this juncture from the ground, not hastily, not awkwardly, but in his own time and at his own pleasure, and standing there, entirely at his ease, looked every inch the living exemplar of that expressive little phrase--"don't-care." Some persons object to being interrupted, he did not. The girl stood up, too, but stood with such a difference! More and more disconcerted she became with every passing second, so ashamed was she of her unsightly old father, in his blue cotton farm clothes, dirty and baggy, and his red cotton handkerchief--no redder than his face--so ashamed, and with such a sense of guilt in her shame! Truth to tell, the contrast between the two men thus confronted, was almost startling; the bloated ungainliness of the one, the sinewy shapeliness of the other; the misshapen grotesqueness of the one, and the sculpturesque comeliness of the other. It was a contrast painful to any intelligent observer, and for the poor girl before us, about to introduce a lover of such mold to a father of such aspect, it was like being put to the rack. "Mr. Devonhough, father." "Mr. _Who?_" gasped a big voice, struggling out from smothered depths of grossness. "Mr. Devonhough," repeated the daughter, looking all manner of ways, "a friend of the Rutlands." "How does ye, Mr. Deviloh?" inquired the old farmer, in his exceedingly countrified, agonizingly familiar manner; extending a big, rough, red, and very filthy hand to be shaken by this exquisite sprig of refined gentility. Mr. Devonhough, needless to mention, touched it as gingerly as if it had been a glaringly wide awake and aggressively disposed Cobra de Capello. He endured the ceremony in silence, however; about as much as could be reasonably expected from one so superbly self-controlled.