e boys who brought her home
after the dances sometimes laughed at the back gate and wakened Mr.
Harling from his first sleep. A crisis was inevitable.

One Saturday night Mr. Harling had gone down to the cellar for beer. As he
came up the stairs in the dark, he heard scuffling on the back porch, and
then the sound of a vigorous slap. He looked out through the side door in
time to see a pair of long legs vaulting over the picket fence. Antonia
was standing there, angry and excited. Young Harry Paine, who was to marry
his employer's daughter on Monday, had come to the tent with a crowd of
friends and danced all evening. Afterward, he begged Antonia to let him
walk home with her. She said she supposed he was a nice young man, as he
was one of Miss Frances's friends, and she did n't mind. On the back porch
he tried to kiss her, and when she protested,--because he was going to be
married on Monday,--he caught her and kissed her until she got one hand
free and slapped him.

Mr. Harling put his beer bottles down on the table. "This is what I've
been expecting, Antonia. You've been going with girls who have a
reputation for being free and easy, and now you've got the same
reputation. I won't have this and that fellow tramping about my back yard
all the time. This is the end of it, to-night. It stops, short. You can
quit going to these dances, or you can hunt another place. Think it over."

The next morning when Mrs. Harling and Frances tried to reason with
Antonia, they found her agitated but determined. "Stop going to the tent?"
she panted. "I would n't think of it for a minute! My own father could n't
make me stop! Mr. Harling ain't my boss outside my work. I won't give up
my friends, either. The boys I go with are nice fellows. I thought Mr.
Paine was all right, too, because he used to come here. I guess I gave him
a red face for his wedding, all right!" she blazed out indignantly.

"You'll have to do one thing or the other, Antonia," Mrs. Harling told her
decidedly. "I can't go back on what Mr. Harling has said. This is his
house."

"Then I'll just leave, Mrs. Harling. Lena's been wanting me to get a place
closer to her for a long while. Mary Svoboda's going away from the
Cutters' to work at the hotel, and I can have her place."

Mrs. Harling rose from her chair. "Antonia, if you go to the Cutters to
work, you cannot come back to this house again. You know what that man is.
It will be the ruin of you."

Tony snatched