And Edith began to do something. Her hostility to her sister had completely disappeared. In its place was a friendly affection, an evident desire to please. She even drew Laura into the secret, and there was a gathering of the clan. There were consultations in Roger's den. "Deborah is to get married." The feeling of it crept through the house. Nothing was said to her, of course, but Deborah was made to feel that her two sisters had drawn close. And their influence upon her choice was more deep and subtle than she knew. For although Roger's family had split so wide apart, between his three daughters there were still mysterious bonds reaching far back into nursery days. And Deborah in deciding whether to marry Allan Baird was affected more than she was aware by the married lives of her sisters. All she had seen in Laura's ménage, all that she had ever observed in Edith's growing family, kept rising from time to time in her thoughts, as she vaguely tried to picture herself a wife and the mother of children. So the family, with those subtle bonds from the past, began to press steadily closer and closer around this one unmarried daughter, and help her to make up her mind. CHAPTER XVII But she did not appear to care to be helped. Nor did Allan--he rarely came to the house, and he went to Edith's not at all. He was even absent from her Christmas tree for the children, a jolly little festivity which neither he nor Deborah had missed in years. "What has got into him?" Roger asked. And shortly after Christmas he called the fellow up on the 'phone. "Drop in for dinner to-night," he urged. And he added distinctly, "I'm alone." "Are you? I'll be glad to." "Thank you, Baird, I want your advice." And as he hung up the receiver he said, "Now then!" to himself, in a tone of firm decision. But later, as the day wore on, he cursed himself for what he had done. "Don't it beat the devil," he thought, "how I'm always putting my foot in it?" And when Baird came into the room that night he loomed, to Roger's anxious eye, if anything taller than before. But his manner was so easy, his gruff voice so natural, and he seemed to take this little party of two so quietly as a matter of course, that Roger was soon reassured, and at table he and Allan got on even better than before. Baird talked of his life as a student, in Vienna, Bonn and Edinburgh, and of his first struggles in New York. His talk was full of human bits, some tragic, more amusing. And Roger's liking for the man increased with every story told. "I asked you here," he bluntly began, when they had gone to the study to smoke, "to talk to you about Deborah." Baird gave him a friendly look. "All right. Let's talk about her." "It strikes me you were right last year," said Roger, speaking slowly. "She's already showing the strain of her work. She don't look to me as strong as she was."