"Oh, I don't know that it makes any serious difference," she said; "not enough to spoil your eyes over, Flossy. I don't want you to go out with us unless you want to; only it is rather embarrassing to be constantly arranging regrets for you. Besides, I don't see what it is all coming to. You will be a moping, forsaken creature; old before your time, if this continues." As for Mr. Shipley, he maintained a haughty silence, neither expressing an opinion on that subject nor on any other, which would involve him in a conversation with Flossy. She knew that he was more seriously displeased with her than were any of the others; not so much about the parties as about other and graver matters. Col. Baker was the son of Mr. Shipley's old friend. For this reason, and for several others, Mr. Shipley was very fond of him. It had long been in accordance with his plans, that Flossy should become, at some future time, Mrs. Col. Baker, and that the estates of the two families should be thus united. While he was not at all the sort of man who would have interfered to push such an arrangement against the preferences of the parties concerned, he had looked on with great and increasing satisfaction, while the plans of the young people evidently tended strongly in that direction. That his daughter, after an absence from home of only two weeks, should have come in contact with that which seemed to change all her tastes and views and plans, in regard to other matters, but which had actually caused her to turn, with a steady and increasing determination, away from the friend who had been her acknowledged protector and attendant ever since she was a child, was a matter that he did not understand nor approve. "I am not a tyrant," he would say sullenly, when Mrs. Shipley and himself talked the matter over; when she, with the characteristics of a mother, even while her child annoyed and vexed her, yet struggled to speak a word for her when a third person came in to blame. "I never ordered Flossy to be so exceedingly intimate with Col. Baker that their names have been coupled together ever since she was a baby. I never insisted on her accepting his attentions on all occasions. It was her own free will. I own that I was pleased with the inclination she displayed, and did what I could to make the way pleasant for her, but the thing is not of my planning. What I am displeased with is this sudden change. There is no reason for it and no sense in it. It is just a mere baby performance, a girlish freak, very unpleasant for him and very disagreeable for us. The child ought not to be upheld in it." So they did their best not to uphold her, and succeeded among them in making her life very disagreeable to her.