The door of the Reverend John Harting’s study was open. In the softened afternoon light which came from the window above his desk, he sat, giving his morrow’s sermon the last polishing touches. But when Janet would have slipped past, he heard her light footstep, and called to her. She stopped at the door. “Come in, my dear,” he said, lifting his spectacles to his forehead, and turning from the outspread pages of manuscript. “Would you mind sitting down a moment? I have something I wish to say to you.” He spoke precisely and formally, and even in ordinary conversation he had a touch of that singsong intonation which all old-time ministers affected. A fringe of white locks, carefully combed, added to the somewhat stern, but almost patriarchal, expression of his angular, deeply lined face. It was the fearless face of a good-hearted man, and yet there was something about it indicative of narrowness and bigotry. Such a face, one fancied, might have belonged to a leader of martyrs. She came to him, and sat upon the arm of his chair, encircling his neck, and patting his cheek. “Now, father, dear,” she laughed coaxingly, “I hope you’re not going to scold. I know you didn’t want me to go to the ball game, but I was just dying to go, and Benton invited me, and――” “He came round here, and cajoled me into consenting, against my will. He is a young man with a most persuasive and flattering tongue.” “I’ll not dispute you,” she said, thinking of those parting words at the door. “He needed a persuasive tongue to win you over, you are so dreadfully set against baseball. You can’t seem to realize that the game itself is really harmless and clean, and two-thirds of the people of this town are crazy over it. They’ll be crazier still after to-day, for we beat Bancroft――shut ’em out without a single tally, gave ’em nine beautiful goose eggs. What do you think of that, father?” He looked a bit puzzled. “What have goose eggs to do with baseball, my dear?” “Oh,” she laughed, “I mean to say that we handed them a beautiful coat of whitewash, and we bingled out a couple of merit marks for ourselves. The crowd just went crazy when our new southpaw slant artist started the fireworks going in the sixth with a clean wallop, moved up a peg on a sacrifice, pilfered the third hassock, and slid home on a beautiful squeeze that gave us our first count, and――” “Stop, Janet!” he cried, bewildered. “What are you talking about?” “Why, baseball, daddy! I’m simply telling you how we won the game.” “You may be trying to tell me, but you are not doing it simply. ‘Coat of whitewash,’ ‘bingle,’ ‘southpaw slant artist,’ ‘clean wallop,’ ‘third hassock,’ ‘beautiful squeeze’! My dear, it’s dreadful for a young lady to use such language. It is ample evidence of the absolutely demoralizing influence of this game called baseball.” She laughed still more gayly, and again patted his cheek caressingly. “That’s simply the idiom of the game, which every true fan understands.”