The Liberry Teacher rose, and squared her straight young shoulders under the worn net waist. "If Mrs. Harrington thinks I'll do for the situation!" she said gallantly,--and laughed again. * * * * * "It feels partly like going into a nunnery and partly like going into a fairy-story," she said to herself that night as she wound her alarm. "But--I wonder if anybody's remembered to ask the consent of the groom!" V He looked like a young Crusader on a tomb. That was Phyllis's first impression of Allan Harrington. He talked and acted, if a moveless man can be said to act, like a bored, spoiled small boy. That was her second. Mrs. Harrington, fragile, flushed, breathlessly intense in her wheel-chair, had yet a certain resemblance in voice and gesture to Mrs. De Guenther--a resemblance which puzzled Phyllis till she placed it as the mark of that far-off ladies' school they had attended together. There was also a graceful, mincing white wolfhound which, contrary to the accepted notion of invalids' faithful hounds, didn't seem to care for his master's darkened sick-room at all, but followed the one sunny spot in Mrs. Harrington's room with a wistful persistence. It was such a small spot for such a long wolfhound--that was the principal thing which impressed itself on Phyllis's frightened mind throughout her visit. Mrs. De Guenther convoyed her to the Harrington house for inspection a couple of days after she had accepted some one's proposal to marry Allan Harrington. (Whether it counted as her future mother-in-law's proposal, or her future trustee's, she was never sure. The only sure thing was that it did not come from the groom.) She had borrowed a half-day from the future on purpose, though she did not want to go at all. But the reality was not bad; only a fluttering, emotional little woman who clung to her hands and talked to her and asked useless questions with a nervous insistence which would have been nerve-wearing for a steady thing, but was only pitiful to a stranger. You see strange people all the time in library work, and learn to place them, at length, with almost as much accuracy as you do your books. The fact that Mrs. Harrington was not long for this world did not prevent Phyllis from classing her, in her mental card-catalogue, as a very perfect specimen of the Loving Nagger. She was lying back, wrapped in something gray and soft, when her visitors came, looking as if the lifting of her hand would be an effort. She was evidently pitifully weak. But she had, too, an ineradicable vitality she could summon at need. She sprang almost upright to greet her visitors, a hand out to each, an eager flood of words on her lips.