It was the most natural thing in the world that Red and the Princess should find each other, and six months before the elopement we heard that the Princess was riding about the country with him in the red-wheeled cart. For after she left the office in one way and another we had kept track of the girl--sometimes through her father, who, being a carpenter, was frequently called to the office to fix up a door or a window; sometimes through the other girls in the office, and sometimes through Alphabetical Morrison, whose big family of girl school-teachers made him a storage battery of social information. It seems that the Rutherford temper developed in the Princess as she grew older. Mrs. Swaney was Juanita Sinclair; her father was a mild-mannered little man, who went out of doors to cough, but her mother was a Rutherford--a big, stiff-necked, beer-bottle-shaped woman, who bossed the missionary society until she divided the church. John Swaney, who is not a talkative man, once got in a crowd at Smith's cigar-store where they were telling ghost stories, and his contribution to the horror of the occasion was a relating of how, when they were fooling with tables, trying to make them tip at his house one night at a family reunion, the spirit of Grandma Rutherford appeared, split the table into kindling, dislocated three shoulder-blades and sprained five wrists. It was this Rutherford temper that the Princess wore when she slouched around the house in her mother-hubbard with her hair in papers. The girls in the office used to say that if her mother over-cooked the Princess's egg in the morning she would rise grandly from the breakfast table, tipping over her chair behind her, and rush to her room "to have a good cry," and the whole family had to let the breakfast cool while they coaxed her down. That was the Rutherford temper. Also, when they tried to teach her to cook, it was the Rutherford temper that broke the dishes. Colonel Morrison once told us that when the Princess thought it was time to give a party, the neighbours could see the Rutherford temper begin wig-wagging at the world through the Princess's proud head, and there was nothing for her father to do but to kill the chickens, run errands all day to the grocery store, and sit in the cellar freezing cream, and then go to the barn at night to smoke. It was known in the neighbourhood that the Princess dragged her shoestrings until noon, and that her bed was never in the memory of woman made up in the daytime. We are Yankees in our town, and these things made more talk to the girl's discredit than the story that she was keeping company with Red Martin!