He had come into the room testily, in a gloomy impatience; but she seemed so genuinely in pain and so pathetically fragile a contestant against her solid mother and against his own robust solidity that suddenly he lost every wish to chide her, even every wish to instruct her. He became weak with compassion, and the only wish left in him was the wish to make her happier. He sat down upon a painted little chair beside the bed. “Lily, child,” he said, huskily, “for pity’s sake, what is it you want?” And again the pathetic lips just moved. “You know, Papa.” There was something in the whispered word “Papa” that cried to him of sweetness under torture, and cried of it with so keen a sound that he groaned aloud. “O, baby girl!” he said, succumbing then and there, when he had least expected such a thing to happen to him. “We _can’t_ let you suffer like this! Don’t you know we’ll do anything on earth to make you happy?” “No. You wouldn’t do the one thing—Papa?” “I said anything,” he groaned. X LILY’S ALMOST FIRST ENGAGEMENT WHEN he came downstairs to his wife, five minutes later, he told her desperately to what he had consented. “There isn’t any alternative,” he said, in his defence against Mrs. Dodge’s outcry. “It was going to happen anyhow, in spite of everything we could do, and she’s grown so _thin_—I hadn’t realized it, but she’s lost heaven knows how many pounds! You don’t want the child to _die_, do you? Well, when I saw her there, so worn and stricken, it came over me what _that_ alternative would mean to us! When it comes to risking her life, I give up. I’d give my own life to keep her from marrying this idiot, but not hers! There’s only one thing for us to do, and we’ve got to go through with it.” “I can’t!” “Yes, you can,” he told her, angrily. “And since we’ve got to do it we’ll do it right. Not another word to her from either of us in dispraise of her idiot. On the contrary! And he’s to be asked to dinner to-morrow night, and as often as she wants him afterward. Blast him, I’ll put him into my own office and try my darnedest to make it a job that’ll interest him. They can be married as soon as he’s saved enough to pay his own way. I’ll give her enough for hers. We’re beaten, Lydia. There’s nothing else to do.” She protested despairingly, and in continued despair finally surrendered her “better judgment,” as she called it, to his weakness. Thus, after a painful evening of argument, they went unhappily to their uneasy beds, but woke in the morning determined to be thoroughbreds in the manner of their acceptance of Oswald Crabbe Osborne as their daughter’s betrothed. Their encounter with him, when he came to dinner that evening in this recognized capacity, was an almost overwhelming trial of their gameness; but they succeeded in presenting the semblance of a somewhat strained beaming upon him, and were rewarded by the sight of a fading daughter blossoming again.