The Emory home had once been a farm-house of the better class; various additions and improvements gave it an air of solid and substantial comfort unusual in a community where the prevailing style of architecture was a square wooden box, built close to the street end of a narrow lot. The doctor himself answered Oakley's ring, and led the way into the parlor, after relieving him of his hat and umbrella. “My wife you know, Mr. Oakley. This is my daughter.” Constance Emory rose from her seat before the wood fire that smoldered on the wide, old-fashioned hearth, and gave Oakley her hand. He saw a stately, fair-haired girl, trimly gowned in an evening dress that to his unsophisticated gaze seemed astonishingly elaborate. But he could not have imagined anything more becoming. He decided that she was very pretty. Later he changed his mind. She was more than pretty. For her part, Miss Emory saw merely a tall young fellow, rather good-looking than otherwise, who was feeling nervously for his cuffs. Beyond this there was not much to be said in his favor, but she was willing to be amused. She had been absent from Antioch four years. These years had been spent in the East, and in travel abroad with a widowed and childless sister of her father's. She was, on the whole, glad to be home again. As yet she was not disturbed by any thoughts of the future. She looked on the world with serene eyes. They were a limpid blue, and veiled by long, dark lashes. She possessed the poise and unshaken self-confidence that comes of position and experience. Her father and mother were not so well satisfied with the situation; they already recognized that it held the elements of a tragedy. In their desire to give her every opportunity they had overreached themselves. She had outgrown Antioch as surely as she had outgrown her childhood, and it was as impossible to take her back to the one as to the other. The doctor patted Oakley on the shoulder. “I am glad you've dropped in. I hope, now you have made a beginning, we shall see more of you.” He was a portly man of fifty, with kindly eyes and an easy, gracious manner. Mrs. Emory was sedate and placid, a handsome, well-kept woman, who administered her husband's affairs with a steadiness and economy that had made it possible for him to amass a comfortable fortune from his straggling country practice. Constance soon decided that Oakley was not at all like the young men of Antioch as she recalled them, nor was he like the men she had known while under her aunt's tutelage--the leisurely idlers who drifted with the social tide, apparently without responsibility or care.