“I doubt if you could have prevented it, dad,” answered the girl. “It was my duty--as host.” Wilmer turned back to her book--a Galsworthy novel. That seemed to be about as far as she could get in it to-night--just to turn back to it again and again. The pages in which ordinarily she was able to lose herself were just so many white pieces of paper covered with print. They were very white and symmetrical and the print very black and even, making so many parallel lines from side to side. But there was a certain monotony to literature in this form. It seemed scarcely worth while to turn the leaves. In the two weeks Wilmer had been living in daily contact with Allston--a more sustained contact than she had ever experienced with any man of her own age--she had developed a very real interest in him. Her life for the last five years, since the death of her mother, had been largely devoted to her father. By nature quiet and reflective, she had found this sphere adequate enough on the whole to satisfy her, and where it did not she was able to piece it out with her books. She read a great deal and intelligently without, however, any especial objective. She preferred, generally speaking, books with an analytical turn and modern rather than classic--James and Meredith, and the younger school of British novelists with their intense if somewhat vague passion for the super-critical and radical approach to present-day problems. And yet the net result of their influence was to leave her rather more conservative than before. She was willing enough to believe these young observers, but the effect of this was to cultivate in her a rather cynical distaste for actual contact with the life they described--particularly on its emotional side. And so, though her home in New Orleans still remained, through her social connections, a gathering-place for a group of young men and women, they came and went marking only so many pleasant inconsequential incidents of a season. There were several young fellows who, it is true, pressed their attentions upon her a little more eagerly than others, but her retreat at the beginning of each summer to this mountain fastness always discouraged them. They preferred to follow the pretty faces which led to the gayer resorts.