ewspaper this week.'"_]

"Well, that part of it isn't especially strange, Mollie. He was born and
brought up in a town three hundred miles from here. I don't see just how
we _could_ have heard his name unless he visited here or got into the
papers in some way."

Mrs. Atwater seemed unwilling to yield a mysterious point. She rocked
decorously in her rocking-chair, shook her head, and after setting her
lips rigidly, opened them to insist that she could never change her
mind: Julia had acted very abruptly. "Why couldn't she have let her poor
father know at least a _few_ days before she did?"

Mr. Atwater sighed. "Why, she explains in her letter that she only knew
it, herself, an hour before she wrote."

"Her poor father!" his wife repeated commiseratingly.

"Why, Mollie, I don't see how father's especially to be pitied."

"Don't you?" said Mrs. Atwater. "That old man, to have to live in that
big house all alone, except a few negro servants?"

"Why, no! About half the houses in the neighbourhood, up and down the
street, are fully occupied by close relatives of his: I doubt if he'll
be really as lonely as he'd like to be. And he's often said he'd give a
great deal if Julia had been a plain, unpopular girl. I'm strongly of
the opinion, myself, that he'll be pleased about this. Of course it may
upset him a little at first."

"Yes; I think it will!" Mrs. Atwater shook her head forebodingly. "And
he isn't the only one it's going to upset."

"No, he isn't," her husband admitted seriously. "That's always been the
trouble with Julia; she never could bear to seem disappointing; and so,
of course, I suppose every one of 'em has a special idea that he's
really about the top of the list with her."

"Every last one of 'em is positive of it," said Mrs. Atwater. "That was
Julia's way with 'em!"

"Yes, Julia's always been much too kind-hearted for other people's
good." Thus Mr. Atwater summed up Julia; and he was her brother.
Additionally, since he was the older, he had known her since her birth.

"If you ask _me_," said his wife, "I'll really be surprised if it all
goes through without a suicide."

"Oh, not quite suicide, perhaps," Mr. Atwater protested. "I'm glad it's
a fairly dry town though."

She failed to fathom his simple meaning. "Why?"

"Well, some of 'em might feel _that_ desperate at least," he explained.
"Prohibition's a safeguard for the disappointed in love."

This phrase and a previous one stirred Florence