"It sags so," murmured her father. "It's my suit-case," said the girl. "My heavy suit-case." "Why not put it down?" asked the man. Across the young girl's fluctuant face a dozen new miseries flared hotly. "I didn't--just know--whether you'd want me to put it down," she said. "You've come home, haven't you?" questioned the man. "Home is supposed to be where your father is, isn't it?" "It never has been," said the girl quite simply. [4] Like a clash of swords the man's eyes smote across the girl's and the girl's across the man's. The ironic grin was still twisting wryly at one corner of the man's mouth but under the mocking fend of his narrowing eye lids a glisten of tears showed suddenly. "Oh--Father," rallied the girl. "They called me an evil name! They----" With a gesture of ultimate bewilderment and despair she took a single step towards him. "Oh, Father," she gasped. "_What_ is it about boys that makes it so wicked to have them around?" And pitched over headlong in a dead faint at his feet. When blackness turned into whiteness again she found herself lying limply in the big Oxford chair before the fire with a slate-colored hound sniffing rather interrogatively at her finger-tips and the strange man whom she had called "father" leaning casually with one elbow on the mantel-piece while he stood staring down at her through a great, sweet, foggy blur of cigarette smoke. "Wh--what is the blue dog's name?" she asked a bit vaguely. "Creep-Mouse," said the man. [5] "I'm--I'm glad there's a dog," she whispered. "So it's all right now, is it?" smiled the man. The smile was all in his eyes now and frankly mechanical still--a faint flare of mirth through a quizzical fretwork of pain. "Yes, it's all right--now," said the girl, "unless of course----" Edging weakly forward to the front of the chair she clutched out gropingly for its cool, creaking straw arms and straightened up suddenly very stiff and tense. "Aren't you even going to ask me," she faltered, "what the boy was doing in my room--at night?" "Oh, of course, I'm only human," admitted her father. Very leisurely as he spoke he stopped to light a fresh cigarette and stood for a moment blowing innumerable rings of smoke into space. "Only somehow--that's a matter," he smiled, "that I'd rather hear directly from the boy himself!" "From the boy himself?" stammered the girl. With her slender, silken-shod limbs, the short skirt of the day, the simple blouse, the tousled hair, she looked for all the world like [6] a little child just jumping up to play. "Why--why he's here now!" she said. "Here _now?_" cried her father. "Where?" "Downstairs," said the girl. "We came on together." "Came on together?" demanded her father. "From college, you mean? Two days and a night?" "Yes," said the girl. With a sharp intake of his breath that might have meant anything the man stepped suddenly forward. Towering to her own little height the girl stood staunchly to meet him.