They sat down in the porch chairs for a time and Johnathan handed the girl’s letter across and Archibald read it. “God!” was Cuttner’s comment as he finished page after page of the “mush.” It disgusted him as much as it had angered Johnathan. It had been fifty years since Archibald had been nineteen and in love. “S’pose we walk a pace,” he suggested. “I’d like to smoke. And we’ll talk.” The two men left the house and while Cuttner puffed at a long black cheroot, Johnathan narrated his parental “troubles” from the first. “Yer right, Forge,” the old man agreed. “Getting a boy past the ‘girl age’ is the hardest job a man can have shoved on to him—and the most thankless. Give ’em a free rein and the young asses go stick their heads in the trap o’ married care. Tighten the rein and it only makes ’em crazier to get at it. So what’s a man to do, anyhow? I’m beginning to think we don’t lay on the harness tug these days strong enough—to begin with—girls as well as boys.” “That doesn’t save Nathaniel from this misalliance with your granddaughter now. What can we do?” “What do you want I should do—at the girl end of it?” “Couldn’t you send her back where she came from?” “Back to A-higher? Yeah, I can send her back to A-higher? But what assurance you got this balky young colt won’t kick over the traces the minute she’s gone and start after her, dragging the whiffletree?” “I’ll attend to that. You get the girl out of town. I’ll keep with him and watch him if I have to eat and sleep with him every night from now till the time he’s twenty-one.” “Won’t be able to help yerself then, will yer?” “But he’ll be a man grown, then, in the eyes of the law. He’ll know his own mind.” “Ain’t far from it now, Forge. Nineteen, ain’t he?” “But two years at this period makes all the difference in the world. Anyhow, if he deliberately goes wrong the moment he’s of age, my hands are clean. I’ll have done my duty in the eyes of the law and of God. After that, he’s got only himself to thank if he makes a foul bed and has to lie in it.” So Johnathan found an unexpected ally in Archibald Cuttner. And the latter returned home to order Carol to “pack her traps and go back to her folks.” IV Johnathan was especially jovial and agreeable about the house that night. He came in whistling. He cracked a couple of ancient jokes and talked about “sparing the money” to get the hall papered. His family looked at one another in puzzled astonishment. Mrs. Forge asked for ten dollars to spend on clothes and got five, three of which were promptly appropriated by Edith for a waist to wear to a dance that she was going to attend unbeknown to her parents. All of them felt electrically that some extraordinary business was afoot. The family retired about ten o’clock. The lights went out. Johnathan fell asleep almost at once. He said it was easy for him to fall asleep because he always had a clear conscience.