But Milly trotted home around the corner to the little house in Acacia Street in anything but a gay mood. The angular, white face of Mr. Clarence Albert Parker was far from fulfilling the idea she had visioned to herself in her Sunday morning dream. She knew well enough why Nettie Gilbert had arranged this particular Sunday supper with the intimacy of only four guests--Milly was very much awake now socially--and she had taken pains to examine the new young man with critical care. He was little, scarcely taller than Horatio, and Milly disliked men whose heads she could look across. But with a silk hat it might not be too bad. And he was slightly bald, as well as pale,--on the whole not robust,--but he had keen little gray eyes that seemed to watch one from the side and take in a great deal. He was a precise, neat, colorless man, the sort turned out by a conservative New England family that invests its savings with scrupulous care at four and three-quarters per cent. No, he was not inspiring, this grandson of the Plymouth Rock, with the thin voice. But he seemed substantial. Mr. Gilbert said so, and Roy Gilbert knew. There were other sombre reflections in Milly's revery that night. The sense of family stringency was urging her to "make good" in some way. She was aware that she was slipping back in the social sands, might become commonplace and neglected, if she did not do something to revive the waning interest in herself. She realized, as she had not definitely realized before, that outside of the social game her life held little or nothing. To be sure, she helped Mrs. Gilbert with her missionary business and charities: she read to a few old men once a week, and she carried flowers over to St. Joseph's Hospital. But she could not pretend to herself that charities occupied her whole being.... No, the only way out was Matrimony. A marriage, suitable and successful, would start her career once more. With something like a desperate resolve Milly put her latch-key into the hole, and let herself into the paternal home, where a familiar family odor greeted her sensitive nostrils. With a grimace of disgust she swept upstairs. Decidedly it was time for her to settle herself, as Nettie phrased it. * * * * *