He anticipated no difficulty in entering his daughter even though it was late in the spring, for he knew that it was likely that a personally conducted tour of some sort, or a summer camp, could possibly be arranged through this school. These plans were the result of a night of vigil. So he read his paper at ease with himself and the world. For the moment he had forgotten the possible arrival of his elder daughter.

His breakfast finished, he adjourned to the library to await the long-distance call. The scattered mail on the desk at once recalled Silver and her suggestion that she would like to visit him. He frowned and sat down at the desk, drawing pen and paper toward him. That must be stopped at once. He had no time or the desire to break the strangeness between them at present. In fact his very soul shrank from seeing Alice’s child, the more so since he had become so aware of Lilla’s child’s approach.

He wrote a kind if somewhat brusque note to Silver saying that she had better defer her visit to some indefinite period for the present, as he was suddenly called away on business—his half intention to take Athalie to her school served as excuse for that statement to his dulled conscience—and that he was deeply immersed in important literary work in which he could not be disturbed. It sounded good enough as he read it over, and he felt decidedly pleased with himself for having worded it so tactfully. He resolved to send it by special delivery to make sure that it reached her before she started. And by the way—what was it she said about taking a position? Of course that must not be allowed. He was fully able and willing to support her. And she could not be too old to go to school. He would arrange for that—not in the school where Athalie would be, however! Perhaps she herself would have a preference. He would ask her. He reached his hand for her letter, which lay on the top of the pile where he had dropped it the night before, for both Molly and Anne had been well trained by the former master that the papers on that desk were sacred and never to be touched.

As he drew the letter toward him and his eyes fell again upon those unaccustomed words: “Dear Father,” something sad and sweet like a forgotten thrill of tenderness went through him, and the face of his beautiful young wife came up before his vision as it had not come now in years.

But before he could read further, or even realize that he had not finished reading the letter the day before, the telephone rang out sharply in the prolonged shrill that identifies a long-distance call, and he dropped the paper and reached for the receiver.

It was the distant school, and the principal for whom they had been searching; but she did not fall in with Patterson Greeves’s plans with readiness, as he had expected, although she at once recognized him. Instead, her voice was anxious and distraught, and she vetoed his arrangements emphatically. An epidemic of measles had broken out in the school in the most virulent form. The school was under strict quarantine, and it was even doubtful, as it was now so late in the spring, whether they would open again until fall. They could not possibly accept his daughter under the circumstances.

In the middle of his dismay there came an excited tapping at the door, following certain disturbing sounds of commotion in the hall, which had not yet been fully analyzed in his consciousness, but which rushed in now to his perturbed mind as if they had been penned up while he telephoned and lost none of their annoyance by the fact that they were now memories.

He called “Come in,” and Anne Truesdale in her immaculate morning dress and stiff white apron and cuffs stood before him, a bright spot of color in her already rosy cheeks and a look of indignant excitement in her dignified blue eyes.

“If you please, Master Pat—” she began hurriedly, with a furtive glance over her shoulder, “there’s a strange young woman at the front door—”

“Hello! Daddy Pat!” blared out a hoydenish young voice insolently, and the young woman, who had not remained at the door as ordered, appeared behind the horrified back of the housekeeper.

For Athalie Greeves, never at a loss for a way to carry out her designs and get all the fun there was going, had not waited decorously at the city station for the train that should have brought her to Silver Sands, but had called from his early morning slumbers a onetime lover of her mother whose address she looked up in the telephone book and made him bring her out in his automobile. In his luxurious car he was even now disappearing cityward having an innate conviction that he and her father would not be congenial.

Patterson Greeves swung around sharply, his hand still on the telephone, his mind a startled blank, and stared.

Anne Truesdale stiffened into indignant reproof, her hands clasped tightly at her white-aproned waist, her chin drawn in like a balky horse, her nostrils spread in almost a snort, as the youngest daughter of the house sauntered nonchalantly into the dignified old library and cast a quick, appraising glance around, leveling her gaze on her father with a half-indifferent impudence.

“Bring my luggage right in here, Quinn! Didn’t you say your name was Quinn?” she ordered imperiously. “I want to show Dad some things I’ve brought. Bring them in here, I said! Didn’t you hear me?”

The old servant hovered anxiously nearby, a pallor in his humble, intelligent face, a troubled eye on his master’s form in the dim shadow of the book-lined room. He turned a deprecatory glance on Anne Truesdale, as he entered with two bags, a shiny suitcase, a hat box, a tennis racket, and a bag of golf clubs, looking for an unobtrusive corner in which to deposit them and thereby stop the noisy young tongue that seemed to him to be committing irretrievable indignities to the very atmosphere of the beloved old house.

“Take them out, Joe,” said Anne Truesdale in her quiet voice of command.

“No, you shan’t take them out!” screamed Athalie, stamping her heavy young foot indignantly. “I want them here! Put them right down there! She has nothing to say about it!”

Joe vacillated from the library to the hall and back again uncertainly and looked pitifully toward his master.

“Put the things in the hall, Joe, and then go out and shut the door!” ordered the master with something in his controlled voice that caused his daughter to look at him with surprise. Joe obeyed, Anne Truesdale thankfully disappeared, and Patterson Greeves found himself in the library alone with his child.

Athalie faced him with a storm in her face.

“I think you are a perfectly horrid old thing!” she declared hysterically with a look in her eyes that at once reminded him of her mother. “I said I wanted those things in here, and I’m going to have them! I guess they are my things, aren’t they?” She faced him a second defiantly and then opened the door swiftly, causing a scuttling sound in the back hall near the kitchen entrance. Vehemently she recovered her property, banging each piece down with unnecessary force and slamming the door shut with a comical grimace of triumph toward the departed servants.

“Now, we’re ready to talk!” she declared, with suddenly returning good humor, as she dropped to the edge of a large leather chair and faced her father again.

Patterson Greeves was terribly shaken and furiously angry, yet he realized fully that he had the worst of the argument with this child as he had nearly always had with her mother, and he felt the utter futility of attempting further discipline until he had a better grasp of the situation. As he sat in his uncle’s comfortable leather chair, entrenched as it were in this fine old dignified castle, it seemed absurd that a mere child could overthrow him, could so put his courage to flight and torment his quiet world.