One looks on at such a situation and says, “If it could stop here, it might be possible.” But it cannot stop there. It is not the adjustment of the relations between parents and child which is the difficult thing. The acceptance of a different point of view by these three may even come without much pain. No; it is the outsiders who make the situation impossible--the father’s cronies, the mother’s friends, the acquaintances of the untaught girlhood. The impossibility revealed itself that very night when Dave Duggan came in to welcome her home. Annie gave him her hand, flushing and paling at his familiarity, his boisterous, facetious “Hollo, Annie! How you was?” In him, after that easy greeting, the first note of the difference made for all time was struck; for he grew conscious and uneasy, and scuffled his feet, and cleared his throat, and laughed in a silly way. Yet all the old admiration spoke in his eyes. Johnny was full of significant jokes, and kept elbowing Annie and winking; and Dave’s loud rebukes of his host’s “fun” were even more meaning. At nearly midnight Annie went upstairs, tired, white, smiling; and lay open-eyed until dawn. * * * * * Dick Temple’s intention of “passing through South Bend in a fortnight” was a little delayed. Cousin Kate’s vague misgivings took the form of a postscript in a casual note to his mother; there was no more than a word or two about Dick’s _tendresse_ for a pretty college-girl who had been the children’s governess during the last three summers while they were out of town; that was all. But it was enough. And Mrs. Paul felt she had done her duty. “And perhaps prevented Dick from doing his,” her husband commented grimly. “If he can be prevented, he’d better be; for he wouldn’t be good enough for Annie Graham!” cousin Kate declared with much spirit, and immediately became, in her own mind, the champion of the incipient love affair. Her letter was passed on by Dick’s mother to Dick’s father, who said good-naturedly that the boy was a jackass. “The young lady is probably too good, for him,” said Mr. Henry Temple, “but I’m not going to have that boy marrying John Paul’s governess without a few remarks from me.”