SHEPPARD

MR. PAUL STRUMLEY stood on the veranda of Mr. Richard Stokes's sumptuous
home in the fashionable suburb of Lawrenceville and faced the daughter
of the house indignantly. The daughter of the house was also plainly
perturbed. Their mutual agitation was sharply accentuated by the fresh
calmness of the spring morning, which seemed to hover like a north-bound
bird over the wide, velvety lawn.

"Bettina," announced Mr. Strumley suddenly, "your father is--is----"

"An old goose."

"No, a brute!"

This explosion appeared momentarily to relieve his state of mind. But in
his breast there was still left a sufficiency of outraged dignity to
warm his cheeks hotly, and not by any means without an abundance of
cause. Scarcely an hour before he had nervously, yet exultantly,
alighted from his big touring car in front of the Commercial Bank, to
seek the president of that institution in the sanctity of his private
office. There, briefly but eloquently, he announced the engagement of
Miss Bettina Stokes to Mr. Paul Strumley, and naively requested for the
happy young people a full share of the parental sanction and blessing.
And his callow confidence can hardly be condemned on recalling that he
was one of the wealthiest and most popular young swains in the city. Mr.
Stokes, however, did not seem to take this into consideration. On the
contrary, he rose to the occasion with an outburst of disapprobation too
inflammatory to be set on paper, and quickly followed it with a
picturesque and uncompromising ultimatum. In the confused distress of
the unexpected Mr. Strumley found himself unable to marshal a single
specimen of logical refutation. He could only retreat in haste, to
recover, if possible, at leisure.

But this leisure, the time it had taken him to hurl the machine across
town to Bettina, had proven sadly insufficient. When he rushed up the
steps to the veranda, where sat the object of his affections rocking in
beautiful serenity, he was still choking from indignation, and had found
it hard to tell her in coherent sentences that her father had
energetically refused the honor of an alliance with the highly
respectable Strumley family.

The grounds, however, on which had been based this unreasonable
objection were of all things under the sun the most preposterous. Mr.
Stokes had emphatically declared that his daughter's happiness was too
dear to him to be foolishly entrusted to one who could not even manage
his own a