It would have surprised her to see the assured and flippant youth silent and shy; it would have astonished her still more to see Glen Darrow color slowly and softly, to see her mouth tremble, but she could not have seen, even with her wise little monkey eyes wide open, her first friend’s inner tumult. She could not even have surmised the wild, sweet panic with which Glen Darrow made the second great discovery of her life, namely, that she did _not_ dislike being touched. It invalidated earlier statements to Luke Manders and convictions to herself; it gave the lie to that distressful scene in the lane, almost a year ago, on her nineteenth birthday. If it lifted her out of the classification of the queer and the strange and the abnormal, it did something else, likewise; it made it shockingly clear that it was only the person who mattered ... it started a trembling and a rumbling and a cracking at the foundations of a dream castle builded six years ago. The color seeped out of her golden-olive face and left it as nearly white as it could ever be, and she drew her hand away. M’liss’ Tolliver was coming noisily up the stairs, very vocal in her grief. “Let’s go down,” Peter Parker whispered. “There are a million things I must tell you, and ask you, and----” Glen shook her head. He had asked her no question in words, but the downright truth of her was beyond any mincing maidenliness. “No,” she said clearly, “I will stay here. It--is no use. You see, I promised my father when he was dying. I am going to marry Luke Manders next month--the day I am twenty years old.” * * * * * Mrs. Eugenia Parker rang the Darrow doorbell an hour later and Glen herself admitted her. “My son told me,” the Federation President began at once, as if fearing she might be denied admission, “of the death of the little girl. He is greatly grieved, for he was deeply interested in her.” “I know he was,” said Glen gently. Mrs. Parker looked rather startled at her tone. “I came to see if I might be of service to you.” “Thank you, no,” she said, still more gently. “Everything has been done. Her aunt was here, but she has gone home again. I asked them to leave her here.” “You will have the funeral?” “Yes--here. Day after to-morrow, because that will be Sunday, and her friends will be free to come.” Then, at what she saw in the older woman’s face, she said--“I’m not regretting Gloriana-Virginia, Mrs. Parker. She is infinitely better off, of course. But I am rebellious”--she did not know that she was giving voice to Peter’s bitter reflection beside Glory’s body--“because she had to die before she ever had a chance to live!” “Yes, I know!” the president concurred with warm sympathy. “But there will be no more Glorys. I mean--conditions are steadily growing better, people are rousing----” “That won’t bring her back,” said Glen, unsteadily.