The news which Milly Richards had brought advised him that he was growing overbold, however. For two weeks thereafter, he and Carol took the Gilberts Mills road instead of going down to the box-shop, where the girl spent the night nestled in her lover’s arms. So it was not this illicit tryst-keeping, finally wrecked by its own success, that caused Johnathan’s complacency to explode in his face. It was a letter that inadvertently fell from Nathan’s hip pocket one day in the mill and which Joe Partridge brought with a grin to Johnathan. “Picked up some private correspondence,” he observed. “Guess it belongs to Nathan.” Private correspondence? Nathan? Johnathan took the bulky envelope addressed in a woman’s round hand to his son at the local postoffice,—General Delivery. He pulled out the sheets and the opening salutation struck him between the eyes like a brick. Johnathan was limp all over when he had finished that effusive epistle. The father scarcely had the strength to rise from his chair. He found his hat and coat and went out into the August sunshine. He must think, think. So they were keeping the asinine courtship alive by correspondence? Fool that he was, he might have suspected. Yet John had read between the lines of the girl’s letter what was no thumb-nail sentiment between lovesick adolescents. The two addressed each other now as grown man and woman. Fortunately, no references had been made by Carol to their nocturnal rendezvous. Johnathan never knew—and does not appreciate to this day—toward the brink of what precipice he did all in his power to drive his boy. But he knew that Nathan had asked the girl to be his wife. She had accepted him. They were only waiting the saving of enough money on Nathan’s part and the making of enough “clothes” on Carol’s to perfect an elopement. The father’s imagination and self-pity started on a rampage again. His temper began to growl. By six o’clock he was a roaring small-town lion, seeking whom he might devour,—principally something in the boy line under twenty-one. Tact and discretion! Tact and discretion! Johnathan knew he should employ them, that he _must_ control his temper or another time he might break worse than his knuckles. Yet how could he save his son from this horribly yawning pit of premature matrimony? At last he had it! Archibald Cuttner! It was true that Johnathan did not know Archibald Cuttner only as he sometimes thrust the collection plate in front of him on Sunday mornings, or had brought his Congress shoes to the Main Street shop for resoling—“in the old days”, as Johnathan already phrased it. But that did not deter him from going at once and laying his case before the girl’s grandparent in a great tumult of hysterical fatherhood. The Cuttners were finishing the evening meal as Johnathan rang the bell. Old Archibald, a thin little man with queer, humped shoulders, came out with his napkin still tucked in his turkey neck.