Three days after this the Lansings left Merivale, but not until Miss Percy had seen Louie again with regard to her voice, and had also interviewed Mr. Grey, after two or three ineffectual attempts to see him. Evidently he tried to shun her, but she captured him at last in his bank, when he could not get away. When he found that the ordeal must be met, he made the best of it, and nothing could have been more polite or courteous than his manner as he took her into his rear office, and listened to her proposition to take his daughter abroad and give her the benefit of a musical training in Paris or Berlin, or both. Nothing was said of the stage as a future possibility, and it is doubtful if Miss Percy had a thought of it. She wanted Louie, and meant to have her, and had planned many things she would do when once the young girl was with her. Accustomed to have her own way, she was not prepared for Mr. Grey’s decided refusal. He thanked her for her interest in Louie, but said he could not part with her. Later, when she was through school, he meant to take her abroad himself and possibly give her some instructions in music, although he doubted if it would help her much. Her voice suited him; training might spoil it. He was very firm, and Miss Percy left him with a feeling that he was a very obstinate man and a very peculiar man, whom she could not understand. He was a gentleman in every respect, but he impressed her as being very shy for one who had seen much of the world. Evidently he was under restraint in her presence, and was relieved when she arose to go, after exhausting every possible argument in favor of taking Louie with her to Europe. He was certainly standing in his own light, or rather in Louie’s, and when she bade the latter good-by she said to her: “If anything ever happens and your father changes his mind, let me know at once.” Nothing ever could happen, Louie was sure, and, although Paris and Marchesi seemed very alluring, she was happy to stay at home with Herbert, who, since their first quarrel, had been very lover-like in his attentions to her when alone with her, but quite indifferent when in public. He did this, he said, to blind his father, who would give him Hail Columbia if he had a suspicion of their relations to each other. Still the secret weighed heavily on Louie, nor was it made easier because of the exquisite diamond ring Herbert put upon her finger the night before he started for college. She could only wear it in her room, or when alone, and it seemed to her a mockery to call it an engagement ring. Her nature was open as the day, and she rebelled against the secrecy imposed upon her, and told Herbert so in every letter she wrote him. These were not many, for here again his caution came in play. If too many letters passed, the post-office clerks might comment, and the gossip reach his father, of whom he seemed more in fear than when he was a boy.