"Anyone would think I was a naughty child, and you were some kind of medicine the whole family was waiting for me to take!" I exclaimed. "It's a wonder you don't get out your watch and give me five minutes to do it in." His eyes began to sparkle with anger. I believe he would have liked to box my ears, and I know I could have boxed his. "I thought English girls were brought up to be sensible," said he, "and amiable." "I can't help what you thought," I answered, rudely, for I was getting desperate. "You've no right to keep me here like this, and it won't do you a bit of good, for if you stand there till we're both in our second childhood, I won't change my mind. You ought to know that now, Mr. Parker. Please let me go." He didn't move. "If you don't, I'll scream at the top of my lungs," I said. And he must have seen that I meant it, for he flung open the door with a slam and I swept past him, with my nose in the air, trying to look like Mother. [Illustration: "_I swept past him with my nose in the air, trying to look like Mother_"] I didn't see him again till it was time to go home. Then he drove back with Mrs. Ess Kay and me to The Moorings in the shut-up motor car, and didn't open his mouth once on the way--which was wonderful for him, and seemed somehow ominous. I had been too angry and excited after that scene of ours to feel unhappy, or to worry much about what might come next, but that drive, short as it was, with Potter freezingly silent, and Mrs. Ess Kay alarmingly polite, made me feel that the end had come. I was sure she had been told by her brother what an obstinate, ungrateful girl I was, and I had a guilty sinking of the heart, as if I really had been both. There was no Sally to protect me now, no one to advise me what to do, and there was a big lump in my throat as I said good night and went to my own room. I hadn't been there long when there came a knock at the door--the same determined kind of inexorable knock which Mother gives when I've been found out in something which she thinks it her duty to make me sorry for. I'd locked the door, and would have liked to make some excuse not to open it; but it was Mrs. Ess Kay's door, and Mrs. Ess Kay's room, just as much as it was Mrs. Ess Kay's brother I had refused. She sailed in all in black, like an executioner, though of course, executioners don't go down into history wearing chiffon trimmed with jet. "My dear Betty," said she, subsiding into a large armchair, "I want to have a serious talk with you." It would have been stupid pretending not to understand, so I just looked at her, and waited. "I daresay, you can guess what it's about?" she went on. "I suppose so," I said. "I'm very sorry about everything. But I can't help not being in love with Mr. Parker, can I?"