Courtney Barr was a meticulously groomed, meticulously courteous man who had, in slipping into middle-age, lost all traces of the boy and youth he must have been. To Sally’s terrified eyes, this rather heavy, ponderous man, on whom dignity rested like a royal cloak, looked as if he had been born old and wise and cold. She wondered how her exquisite, arrogant little mother could love him so devotedly. Almost immediately after the awkward introduction—“This is our Sally, Court!”—the three of them had had dinner together, a silent meal, so far as Sally was concerned. She had felt that the Enid with whom she had talked and laughed and wept these two days had slipped away, leaving this sophisticated, strange woman in her place, a woman who was in nowise related to her, a woman who was merely Mrs. Courtney Barr. They left her alone for an hour after dinner, an hour which she spent in her own room in writing a long, frightened, appealing letter to David. At nine o’clock Enid knocked on her door and invited her to join them in the parlor of the luxurious suite which had been such a delight to orphanage-bred Sally. She found Courtney Barr seated in a large arm chair, her mother perched on the arm of it, one tiny foot in a silver slipper swinging with nervous rapidity. The man smiled bleakly, a smile that did not reach his cold gray eyes, as Sally took the nearby chair that he indicated. “Mrs. Barr and I have been discussing your immediate future, Sally,” he began ponderously, in tones that he evidently thought were kind. Institutional timidity closed down upon Sally; under those cold eyes she lost that ephemeral beauty of hers which depended so largely upon her emotions. It was her institutional voice—meekness hiding fear and rebellion—which answered: “Yes, sir.” “Oh, let me talk to her, Court!” Enid begged. “You’re scaring my baby to death. He fancies himself as an old ogre, Sally darling, but he’s really a dear inside. You see, Sally, I was so eager to find my baby that I made no plans at all.” Courtney Barr said, “I think I’d better do the talking after all, my dear. Your sentimentality—natural, of course, under the circumstances—would make it impossible for you to state the case clearly and convincingly.” Sally’s cold hands clasped each other tightly in her lap as she stared with wide, frightened eyes at the man who was about to arrange her whole future for her. “I have made Mrs. Barr understand how impossible it will be for us to take you into our home at once, as our adopted daughter,” Courtney Barr went on in his heavy, judicial voice. Sally sprang to her feet, her eyes blazing in her white face. “I didn’t ask to be found, to be adopted!” she cried. “If you don’t want me, say so, and let me go back to David!”