Gaviller scarcely listened to this.  “I’ll have to bring in a chaperon for you!” he cried.

“Oh, Lord!” groaned Colina.  “Anything but that!  What do you want me to do?”

“Merely to live like other girls,” said Gaviller; “to observe the proprieties.”

“That’s why I couldn’t get along at school,” muttered Colina gloomily.  “You might as well send me back.”

“You’re simply headstrong!” said her father severely.  “You won’t try to be different.”

“Dad,” said Colina suddenly, “what did you come north for in the first place, thirty years ago?”

The question caught him a little off his guard.  “A natural love of adventure, I suppose,” he said carelessly.

“Perfectly natural!” said Colina.  “Was your father pleased?”

Gaviller began to see her drift.  “No!” he said testily.

“And when you went back for her,” Colina persisted, “didn’t my mother run away north with you, against the wishes of her parents?”

“Your mother was a saint!” cried Gaviller indignantly.

“Certainly,” said Colina coolly, “but not the psalm-singing kind.  What do you expect of the child of such a couple?”

“Not another word!” cried Gaviller, banging the table—­last refuge of outraged fathers.

Colina was unimpressed.  “Now you’re simply raising a dust to conceal the issue,” she said relentlessly.

Gaviller chewed his mustache in offended silence.

Colina did not spare him.  “Do you think you can make your child and hers into a prim miss, to sit at home and work embroidery?” she demanded.  “Upon my word, if I were a boy I believe you’d suggest putting me in a bank!”

John Gaviller helped himself to another egg with great dignity and removed the top.  “Don’t be absurd, Colina,” he said with a weary air.

It was a transparent assumption.  Colina saw that she had reduced him utterly.  She smiled winningly.  “Dad, if you’d only let me be myself!  We could be such pals if you wouldn’t try to play the heavy father!”

“Is it being yourself to act like a harum-scarum tomboy?” inquired Gaviller sarcastically.

Colina laughed.  “Yes!” she said boldly.  “If that’s what you want to call it?  There’s something in me,” she went on seriously.  “I don’t know what it is—­some wild strain; something that drives me headlong; makes me see red when I am balked!  Maybe it is just too much physical energy.

“Well, if you let me work it off it does no harm.  If I can ride all day, or paddle or swim, or go hunting with Michel or one of the others; and be interested in what I’m doing, and come home tired and sleep without dreaming—­why everything is all right.  But if you insist on cooping me up!—­well, I’m likely to turn out something worse than harum-scarum, that’s all!”

Gaviller flung up his arms.

“Really, you’ll have to go back to your aunt,” he said grimly.  “The responsibility of looking after you is too great!”