child was
overwrought. A wrong touch now might wreck her altogether. But the right
touch? Or, rather, no touch at all, but just an open door before her?
Ah, that was another matter. My plan was a daring one; it made her
tremble a little, but perhaps it was the best one; at all events, she
could see no other. Then she stood up and gave me both hands again. "I
will trust you, my friend," said she. "I know that you love us and our
children. You shall do what you think best and I will be satisfied.
Good-night."

The difficulty with the situation, as I looked it over carefully
while indulging in a third cigar in my bedroom, was that the time was
desperately short. It was now one o'clock on Tuesday morning. About nine
Cyrus would perform his sacred duty of crushing his darling Peggy by
telling her that she must stay in Eastridge. At ten o'clock on Saturday
the Chromatic would sail with Charles Edward and Lorraine and Stillman
Dane. Yet there were two things that I was sure of: one was that Peggy
ought to go with them, and the other was that it would be good for her
to--but on second thought I prefer to keep the other thing for the end
of my story. My mind was fixed, positively and finally, that the habit
of interference in the Talbert family must be broken up. I never
could understand what it is that makes people so crazy to interfere,
especially in match-making. It is a lunacy. It is presuming, irreverent,
immoral, intolerable. So I worked out my little plan and went to sleep.

Peggy took her father's decree (which was administered to her privately
after breakfast on Tuesday) most loyally. Of course, he could not give
her his real reasons, and so she could not answer them. But when she
appeared at dinner it was clear, in spite of a slight rosy hue about her
eyes, that she had decided to accept the sudden change in the situation
like a well-bred angel--which, in fact, she is.

I had run down to Whitman in the morning train to make a call on young
Goward, and found him rather an amiable boy, under the guard of an
adoring mother, who thought him a genius and was convinced that he had
been entrapped by designing young women. I agreed with her so heartily
that she left me alone with him for a half-hour. His broken arm was
doing well; his amatoriness was evidently much reduced by hospital diet;
he was in a repentant frame of mind and assured me that he knew he had
been an ass as well as a brute (synonymes, dear boy), and that he