And while I read the letter, I just knew he would do it. Why, I could even see the sparkle of the ring on my finger. But in five minutes after the letter was folded and put away, I knew, with equal certitude--that he wouldn't. It was like that all that spring term. While under the spell of the letters, as I read them, I saw myself the adored wife of Jerry Weston, and happy ever after. All the rest of the time I knew myself to be plain Mary Marie Anderson, forever lonely and desolate. I had been at home exactly eight hours when a telegram from Jerry asked permission to come at once. As gently as I could I broke the news to Father and Mother. He was Helen's brother. They must have heard me mention him, I knew him well, very well, indeed. In fact, the purpose of this visit was to ask them for the hand of their daughter. Father frowned and scolded, and said, "Tut, tut!" and that I was nothing but a child. But Mother smiled and shook her head, even while she sighed, and reminded him that I was twenty--two whole years older than she was when she married him; though in the same breath she admitted that I _was_ young, and she certainly hoped I'd be willing to wait before I married, even if the young man was all that they could ask him to be. Father was still a little rebellious, I think; but Mother--bless her dear sympathetic heart!--soon convinced him that they must at least consent to see this Gerald Weston. So I sent the wire inviting him to come. More fearfully than ever then I awaited the meeting between my lover and my father and mother. With the Westons' mansion and manner of living in the glorified past, and the Anderson homestead, and _its_ manner of living, very much in the plain, unvarnished present, I trembled more than ever for the results of that meeting. Not that I believed Jerry would be snobbish enough to scorn our simplicity, but that there would be no common meeting-ground of congeniality. I need not have worried--but I did not know Jerry then so well as I do now. Jerry came--and he had not been five minutes in the house before it might easily have seemed that he had always been there. He _did_ know about stars; at least, he talked with Father about them, and so as to hold Father's interest, too. And he knew a lot about innumerable things in which Mother was interested. He stayed four days; and all the while he was there, I never so much as thought of ceremonious dress and dinners, and liveried butlers and footmen; nor did it once occur to me that our simple kitchen Nora, and Old John's son at the wheel of our one motorcar, were not beautifully and entirely adequate, so unassumingly and so perfectly did Jerry unmistakably "fit in." (There are no other words that so exactly express what I mean.) And in the end, even his charm and his triumph were so unobtrusively complete that I never thought of being surprised at the prompt capitulation of both Father and Mother.