“Stop thinking, then! Don’t be a fool, Reliance! Why, that girl has told me fifty times that she thinks as much of me as if I was her own father. She talks about how kind I’ve been to her and how she never can pay me back and all that. Do you suppose that is all lies? Do you think she’d throw me over for that--that Cook calf? Don’t be a fool, I tell you. Look here! What is this all about? Do you _want_ her to marry him?” A slow shake of the head prefaced Reliance’s answer. And that answer was gravely spoken. “No, Foster,” she said. “I don’t.” “Of course you don’t, unless you _are_ a fool. And, if every fool in creation wanted it, she shouldn’t do it.” Reliance paid no attention to this declaration. She had dropped the ribbon in her lap and now she spoke earnestly and deliberately. “No, Foster,” she repeated. “I _don’t_ want her to marry Bob Griffin. He seems to be a fine young man and a good one, but the reason why I don’t want that marriage isn’t on account of what he is, but who he is. This whole matter has worried me a lot. It worries me now. I can’t see anything but trouble ahead for everybody if it goes on.” “Humph! You don’t need a spyglass to see that. Well, it isn’t going on. It will stop inside of two weeks. Once get the Atlantic Ocean between them and it will stay between them until they both forget--until she does, anyhow. He can remember until he is gray-headed if he likes, it won’t do him any good.” She had picked up her sewing again, but now she looked up from it with, or so he thought, an odd expression. Since the beginning of their conversation he had been conscious of something unusual in her manner. Now there was a peculiar questioning scrutiny in her look; she seemed to be wondering, to be not quite sure--almost as if she were expecting him to say something, he could not imagine what. “Why are you staring at me like that?” he demanded, irritably. “What is it?” She did not reply to his question, but asked one of her own, one quite irrelevant and trivial, so far as he could see. “Have you heard any news lately?” she inquired. “News? What kind of news?” “Oh, any news about--well, about any one we know?” “No.... See here, what do you mean? Have you heard something?”