Marguerite sat behind her screen of honeysuckle vines, her face in her hands and a mob of blind, wild, incoherent desires and doubts making tumult in her heart, until she heard her father's footsteps in the house. Pierre Delarue had been taking his Sunday afternoon siesta, and he came out upon the veranda in a very comfortable frame of mind. He patted Marguerite's shoulder affectionately and asked her to make him a cup of tea. He was very fond of his fair young daughter, who had grown into the living likeness of the wife he had married in the days of his exuberant youth. But he rarely withdrew his thoughts from outside affairs long enough to be conscious of his affection, except on Sunday afternoons, when interest and excitement on Main street were at too low an ebb to attract his presence. On other days, she endeared herself to him by the sympathetic attention she gave to his accounts of what was going on down-town and to his rehearsals of the speeches he had made. On Sundays, when he had the leisure to feel a quickened sense of responsibility, he both pleased himself and felt that he was discharging a duty to her by discoursing upon his observations and experiences of the world and by propounding his theories of life and conduct. For Pierre prided himself on his philosophy quite as much as he did on his oratory. Marguerite, on her part, was very fond of her father, but it was a fondness which considered his love of speech-making and his flighty enthusiasms with smiling tolerance. Her cooler and more critical way of looking at things had caused her, young as she was, to distrust his judgment in practical affairs, and about most matters she had long since ceased asking his advice. She sat beside him and talked with him while he drank his cup of tea. A recently married young couple passed the house, and Marguerite made some disapproving comment on the man's character, adding that she did not understand how so nice a girl could have married him. "Oh, he has a smooth and ready tongue," answered her father, "and I dare say it was easy for him to make love. When you are older you will know that it is the man who can talk love easily who can make the most women think they love him." Pierre Delarue stopped to drink the last of his tea, and Marguerite blushed consciously, remembering the scene through which she had just passed. She rose to put his cup on the table, and was glad that her face was turned away from him when next he spoke: