Arthur did indeed call once on the lawyer's daughter, but she made no impression on the heart that already held a fairer image. But he was curious to know the girl who had been the cause of the duel. When he had satisfied his curiosity and laughed in his sleeve over her wasted airs and graces, he retreated from the field, and none of her efforts could inveigle him inside her doors again.
The story of Ladybird's flirtations was well known to everybody else before it reached her father and the Winans family.
Bruce Conway was one of the proudest of men, and although he had been an accomplished flirt in his own day he could not tolerate it in his daughter. The truth horrified him.
If it had been any other girl than Ladybird, his own lovely daughter, he would have laughed in his idle, graceful way at her novel method of doing justice to her lovers, the "heroes," as she termed them—but this came home too nearly.
He recalled with a groan his pleasant hopes and fancies built on his daughter's preference for Earle Winans. Then he muttered:
"Engaged to a fellow I never saw! A village lawyer's clerk! That Jack Tennant! Won in a lottery—my daughter! Good heavens! how careless and thoughtless I have been, taking my own way and letting Ladybird take hers. Otherwise this never could have happened."
For the most of his life Bruce Conway had taken things easily, and life had gone easy with him, but here was something that shook him up, as it were.
He had a long talk with Miss Prudence Primrose, during which she said so often, "I told thee so, Bruce, I told thee so," that it almost drove him mad.
"But what can I do with her? How restrain her in the future, even if she ever lives down the notoriety of this ridiculous prank?" he groaned.