Howard Maitland's departure in January for the Philippines surprised several people.

"Why should he take such a long journey?" Miss Mary Graham said to Miss Eliza—"unless it is that he discovered that Miss Payton is not the sort of girl to make any man happy, and simply left the country."

"I wager he carried a mitten with him!" Miss Eliza said.

"What! You think she refused him? Maria Spencer says she's only too anxious to get him. Meeting him in empty apartments! Perhaps that disgusted him. A gentleman does not like to be pursued."...

"Why has he gone away?" Mrs. Childs asked Laura, mildly interested.

"Because he wants to hunt for shells."

"But I thought he was so attentive to Freddy?"

"Maybe she turned him down."

"She'll get a crooked stick at last, if she doesn't look out," her father said, over the top of his newspaper.

Laura came and sat on the arm of his chair. "Fred doesn't need a stick, Billy-boy; she can walk alone."

"Every one of you needs a stick," Mr. William Childs assured her; "and I don't know that I would confine it[Pg 117] to the thickness of my thumb, either, as the English law does." He reached up a plump hand and pulled her ear. Afterward he told his wife that Lolly was down by the head: "What's the matter with her, Mother?" he said. His two sons might have failed in their various businesses, or taken to their beds with mumps or measles, and he would not have looked as anxious as he did when he heard the little flat note in Laura's voice. "Is she off her feed because I won't let her walk in that circus parade of Fred's?"

"Well, she's disappointed."

"I won't have a girl of mine tramping through the mud—"

"Perhaps it won't be muddy."

"It will! It always is. Anyway, I hope it will be. But if she is upset about it, I'll take her to St. Louis with me that week, so she won't feel she's backed out. Mother, you don't suppose she's missing that Maitland chap, do you? Hey? What?"

"Oh, dear me, no! Why, Mr. Maitland has been paying attention to Freddy for the last year."

"Why doesn't she take him, and stop all her nonsense? I hear she told those poor, silly strikers in Dean's rubber-factory to support Smith, the 'Woman's Candidate'! Much 'supporting' they can do! And the joke of it is, Smith himself owns the controlling stock. She had better be at home, darning her stockings."

"Oh, now, Father, you must remember it isn't as if Ellen didn't have plenty of servants to do things like that."

[Pg 118]

"I hear she's signed that petition to have certain kinds of diseases registered. I don't know what the world's coming to, that girls know about such things!"

"Well, of course, girls are more intelligent than they used to be."

"If she's so intelligent, I'll give her a book on Bacon-Shakespeare that will exercise her brains,—and she can stop concerning herself with matters that decent women know nothing about. Thank Heaven, our Laura is as ignorant as a baby! Or, if Fred is so bent on reforming things, let her have a Sunday-school class," said Mr. Childs, puffing and scowling. "Look here, Mother, if you have any influence over her, try and get her to take young Maitland. I should sleep more easily in my bed if I thought she had a man to keep her in order."

"But he has gone away," Mrs. Childs objected.

"That's because she has turned him down. Maybe he'll never think of her again; I wouldn't, if I were a young fellow! I'd want a woman, not a man in petticoats. But if he does get on her track again, tell her to take him; tell her I say she'll get a crooked stick if she waits too long. You're sure Laura isn't blue about him?"

"Now, Father! You are the most foolish man about that child!..."

"Why has Maitland gone on that expedition, Fred?" said Mr. Weston.

"You can search me," said Miss Payton.

Arthur Weston's hands, concealed in his pockets, tightened. "She has refused him!" he said to himself. (Alas![Pg 119] shooting ducks on the marshes had not helped him!) He had dropped in at 15 Payton Street, and Fred had taken him up to the flounced and flowery sitting-room.

"Mother'll be in pretty soon," she said; "so let's talk business, quick!" She was apparently absorbed in "business," which, as the winter thawed and drizzled into spring, flagged very much. "And the office rent goes right along, just the same," she told her trustee, ruefully. "I think, if I could have a little car to run around and look at places—"

"Maitland put that idea in your head!"

Frederica did not defend her absent adorer. Instead, she wailed over the rapacity of her landlord.

"You ought to have made your rent contingent on your customers," Mr. Weston teased her; and roared when she took it seriously and said she wished she had thought of it. "Give me some tea, Fred," he said; "these questions of high finance exhaust me." Then he asked the usual question, and Fred gave the usual answer. "But what do you hear from him?" Weston persisted. "I suppose you write to him occasionally? You mustn't be too cruel."

"Well, I don't hear much," she said. She took a letter out of her pocket and handed it to him.

When he had read it, he was silent for a while. ("If this is the sort of letter a blighted being writes," he reflected, "love has changed since my time.")

"Dear Fred," the letter ran, "I'm having the time of my life. Tell Laura Childs I saw a shell necklace that she'd be perfectly crazy about. The dredging ..."

[Pg 120]

Then followed two pages about shells, which Mr. Weston, raising a bored eyebrow, skipped.

"Those books you sent were bully. They look very interesting. I haven't had time to read them yet. Tell Laura they use boa-constrictors here instead of cats; and tell her that the flowers are perfectly wonderful."

Then came something about suffrage, ending with a ribald suggestion that the suffragists should get a Filipino candidate—"He wouldn't cost so much as the chief of bosses, Mr. Smith; a Moro will root for 'votes for women' if you promise him a bottle of whisky."

"He is not losing sleep over being rejected," Arthur Weston thought, as he handed the letter back to her.... He had lost some sleep himself, lately: "And there's no excuse for it," he told himself; "I didn't fall in love, I strayed in—in spite of sign-posts on every corner! And now I'm in, I can't get out. Damn it, I will get out!" But each day it seemed as if he 'strayed' farther in....

"Why has H. M. gone off?" Laura asked Frederica.

"Why, you know! Shells," Fred said, astonished at the question.

"Tell that to the marines. Freddy, you bounced him!"

"I did not."

"Well, then, if you didn't, what color are the bridesmaids' dresses to be?" Laura retorted.

"Get out!" said Frederica.

"Why has Mr. Maitland left town?" Mrs. Payton asked her daughter.

[Pg 121]

"Shells."

"Oh," Mrs. Payton said; "but I thought he—you—I mean, I supposed ... Freddy, he's a nice fellow. I wish—"

"Oh, nice enough," Fred admitted, carelessly.

"She's refused him," Mrs. Payton thought; and sighed.

Even Flora had to ask her question: "Mr. Maitland has gone away, they say, Miss Freddy?"

"So I hear."

"Men," said Flora, heavily, "is always going away! Why can't they stay in one place, same as ladies?"

"They are not so important as we are," Miss Freddy assured her.

"If they was all swep' out of the world, it would be just the............