Minga stood pulling down her belt. She gave the bobbed head a resolute shake. "I'm going," she said. She stood there, a curious little picture of untried resolution. "I don't know exactly what's come over me," the girl confessed. "I've nothing against you, Dunce; you've been a real sweet idiot, and I'm going to see us through the Terry rescue, but after the Terry rescue," said Minga in a solemn tone, "home I've got to go." She hesitated a moment adding, "Anyway, after that, you see, Judgie will hate me and turn me out and Aunt Reely will be nervous and Sard will be queer and gloomy and you----" "Anyway I'll be annoying," said Dunstan obstinately, "the way I've been right along." There was a long silence for this talkative pair. At last: "Anyway," said Minga, "I sort of see things different. I can't seem to want to visit around as much as I used. I'm going home to be a daughter, that sort of thing." "Oh, deliver us!" groaned Dunstan. "Oh my soul! Say, what's the matter, girl, didn't your last allowance come? Nobody's a daughter nowadays; it isn't done. Say, Minga, this is awful! Anyway--don't go!" Minga stood first on one foot, then on the other. In her mind, a little dazed and haunted by recent events, still rang Shipman's summing up of her after their various encounters, and the final night at the dance. The lawyer had held the two tantalizing hands very tightly and murmured, "You are a very dear little thing, a very dear little thing." He had said it with a sort of tortured groan. Minga was beginning to realize with a good deal of slow pain how a man might resolutely hold a girl like her away from himself and herself, from something to which, the girl was clever enough to know, she had half unconsciously tried to lure him. The sentence with its tender repudiation of her had penetrated to something honest in her heart. Then had come the morning outside the court-house when Shipman had defined life to them. The older man's power, his penetrating analysis, had somehow reached to the soul that lay dormant, the little butterfly character had sleepily stirred, the little blue egg had broken, and Minga, a scared soul, looked forth upon a universe that had a spiritual endlessness. Some new dim sense of men came to her, not as strong creatures that must be made silly slaves to women or played upon by light motives, but as loyal brothers who had enormous power of strength or suffering through women. Watts Shipman's world of standards and honor stood out to her like a strange austere country of mountains and looming towers as to which she was supremely curious, but into which her feet hardly knew how to tread.