The minister mentioned the point at which they had arrived in the discussion, and for a little they talked all round the matter. Then Miss Pritchard presented her conclusions. "Those babes took things into their own hands in great style a year ago," she declared. "They got hold of a deck of cards and shuffled them to suit themselves, not realizing that isn't the way to play the game. They shouldn't have touched the cards and they shouldn't have shuffled them; but somehow they happened to make a good deal all round. As the game has come out, we all like it. We shouldn't, indeed, be willing to go back and deal out fresh hands. Am I wrong?" The rejoinder indicated that she was wholly in the right. "Now, for my part, I'm used to Elsie Moss and I want to keep her, but I wouldn't take her out of reach of her own kin--at least not for some time. There's a man in Boston I want her to study with--she's going to be an opera-singer--and we're to be here at the inn all summer so that we can get respectively acquainted with our shuffled kith and kin--I want a chance to know my little Pritchard cousin, too." It seemed easier to speak beside the point than to the question. Thereupon the minister suggested that Miss Pritchard should remain permanently at Enderby. That might well have waited, but Miss Pritchard declared she had already thought of taking a house in the fall. "I thought if you insisted upon trading back, we'd all be in sight of one another that way, even though we elders might be mutually hating each other," she added. Whereupon they began to mention particular houses, and would have gone on indefinitely but for Mrs. Moss. It was she, the outsider, for whom, whatever the sequel, there would be no place in the plans, who called them back to the real matter at issue. "Apparently, then," she said, "you're going to let things remain largely in the _status quo_. But one difficulty comes to my mind. When all is said, my Elsie was wholly at fault in all this. She's sorry now, but for all that, I'm afraid she hasn't taken it so hard as this Elsie here, and what's more--this is what I'm getting at: Elsie Moss can drop the name she assumed falsely and, going elsewhere, resume her own as a matter of course. But this Elsie, who has become well acquainted here and entered into the life of the place, cannot suddenly change from Moss to Marley without a great deal of pain to herself." Quite true. No one had thought of that. It seemed appalling! "Of course," Mrs. Moss went on rather doubtfully, "she could keep on with the name. It's perfectly possible to have two Elsie Mosses in one family. People would only take them for cousins." "It's possible," the minister acknowledged, "but it wouldn't be right. It wouldn't be honorable for Elsie to continue to use the name now." "Ah, but Jack, it would be cruelly hard for her to change back to Marley!" cried his wife; and he sadly agreed.