"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 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."