“But--isn’t the superintendent in a position to know?” “_I’ll_ say he is!” admitted her son heartily. She studied his guileless young face for a long moment of silence. “Peter! Do you mean----” “I shan’t know for certain what I mean until you bring me the expert above mentioned,” he chided her gently, and the Federation President, with a little gasp, hurried from the room the second time that day to do the imperious bidding of her flippant son. It was on the following Sunday afternoon that Miss Ada Tenafee came fluttering upstairs to tell her protégée that Mr. Peter Parker was calling. Glen had been sitting in her primly charming chamber with the purple rosebuds and weeping willows and humming birds on the wall, with her hands folded in her lap, looking out of the window at the magnolia tree where a cardinal was making liquid inquiry--“_What cheer? What cheer? What cheer?_” She stood up quickly and turned a paling face to her friend. “I can’t see him, Miss Ada. I--_can’t_!” “Oh, honey, you must!” the spinster urged emotionally. “The chauffeur had to almost carry him up the steps, and the nurse is waiting in the machine, and he looks--he looks--” she choked over it--“like death on a pale horse riding! He says he asks for only five minutes. Glen! You must go down, dearie!” He was sitting in the Tenafee chair, and when the girl came into the room he got up promptly, but with some difficulty, and he swayed a little as he faced her. “You shouldn’t have come,” said Glen very low. “I had to come. You wouldn’t come to me.” “I couldn’t.” “You _wouldn’t_.” Miss Ada, peeping down on them from the upper hall, thought how amazingly, appealingly young he looked ... indeed, they both did ... like a pair of anxious, unhappy, desperate children. “Do you--feel stronger?” Glen managed. “My head aches most of the time,” he admitted plaintively. “I’m sorry.” “Then will you sit down in that chair and let me sit on the Wishing Carpet and put my head in your lap? I have the feeling that it would help a lot.” She shook her head, scarlet cheeked. “Did my mother tell you my plans for making over the mill and what I’m doing for Beany since--” he lifted a hand to his bandaged head--“the slight concussion of what we doubted very much was there?” She nodded, “Yes; she told me. And I want to tell you--I was going to write you--I want to take back--” she came to a standstill, her eyes on the floor. “I don’t know what you can take back,” said Peter Parker gravely. “You’ve never given me anything except hating and despising and----” “It’s that I want to take back. I want to tell you that it wasn’t true, what I said about you in _The Torch_,” the doctor’s daughter told him very low, “and that I know it wasn’t true, and that--I’m sorry.” “Then it isn’t because you still despise me?” “No; oh, _no_!”