“It isn’t,” she said. “He has nothing whatever to do with it. It’s Lily’s imagination. Her imagination was in the state to get the disease, and it just happened this boy was the nearest thing at a crucial moment. It might as well have happened to be someone else.” “If it _had_ only been any one else!” Mr. Dodge exclaimed. “I’m willing to agree with you, though: Crabbe just happened to be the fatal microbe. Well, he’s done for us, that’s sure!” Mrs. Dodge glanced sidelong at him—she was making intermittent efforts to read, and a table and a lamp were between them. “‘Done for us?’ Well, you said there was no alternative, didn’t you? It’s your policy, isn’t it?” “I suppose so,” he groaned. “I suppose so, Lydia.” Then, shaking his head ruefully, and with a grunt of desolate laughter in his throat, he said: “I know, of course, that you’re going to lash me with it—my ‘policy’—for the rest of our lives!” But this was a prediction unfulfilled, for they had missed a clew that was in their hands; or, more accurately, it had been in their mouths, and they had actually spoken it. A toy withheld becomes the universe to a child, and a lover withheld is life and death; but toys and lovers freely given are another matter. What Mr. and Mrs. Dodge failed to see was the significant relation of five to three. . . . The gloomy parents, despondently communing, were still in the library at midnight when Lily came home. They heard her laughter outside before the latchkey turned in the lock of the front door; and then, with the opening of the door, her voice sounded in a gay chattering like a run of staccato notes in an aria of spring. Accompanying it, interrupting it, there was heard a ’cello obbligato, a masculine voice, young and lively, and this short duet closed with Lily’s “See you day-after-to-morrow!” She came dancing into the library, all white fur and flying silk. “Oh, you mustn’t!” she cried. “You dear things, you mustn’t sit up for me!” “We didn’t,” her mother said. “We were just reading. Who was it that brought you home? I asked your Aunt Sarah——” “Oh, no! Aunt Sarah was there, but I didn’t want to trouble her to come out of her way.” Lily seated herself lightly on the arm of her mother’s chair, letting one cheerful foot swing and resting an affectionate hand upon Mrs. Dodge’s shoulder. “Freddie Haines brought me home. He’s a nice boy.” “Is he?” “I like him awf’ly,” said Lily. “I danced with lots of others, though, too. I didn’t want ’em to think I was only going to dance with nobody but Fred.” “Didn’t you?”