“No, she hasn’t,” said Charlotte, with indignation.  She caught her father’s arm and clung to it lovingly.  “There is nobody in the world so good as you,” said she, with fervor.  “I wouldn’t leave you for any man in the world, papa.”

“You wait,” Carroll said, laughing.

“Papa, you don’t wish I were going to be married too?  You don’t want me to go away like Ina?” Charlotte demanded, with a sudden grieved catch in her voice.

“I never want you to go, darling,” Carroll replied, and he looked down with adoration at the little face whose whole meaning seemed one of innocent love for and belief in him.  He realized the same terror at the mere fancy of losing this artless and unquestioning devotion as one might feel at the fancy of losing his only prop from the edge of a precipice.  The man really had for an instant a glimpse of a sheer descent in his own nature which might be ever before his sickened vision if this one little faith and ignorance were removed.  In a curious fashion a man sometimes holds an innocent love between himself and himself, and Carroll so held Charlotte’s.

“I will never leave you for any other man.  I don’t care who he is,” Charlotte reiterated, and this time her father let her assertion go unchallenged.  He pressed the little, clinging hand on his arm closer.

Charlotte looked at him as she might have looked at a king as he walked along in his stately fashion.  She was unutterably proud of him.

The carriage had reached the house some time before they arrived.  The man was just driving round to the stable when they came up to the front door.  The guest and Ina were nowhere to be seen, but on the porch stood Mrs. Carroll and Anna.  They were both laughing, but Anna looked worried in spite of her laugh.

“What do you think, Arthur,” whispered Mrs. Carroll, with a cautious glance towards a chamber window.  “Here he has come, the son-in-law, and there is no meat again for dinner.”  Mrs. Carroll burst into a peal of laughter.

“I don’t see much to laugh at,” said Anna, but she laughed a little.

Carroll made a step to the side of the porch and called to the coachman.  “Martin,” he called, “don’t take the horse out.  Come back here.  We must send for something,” he declared, a little brusquely for him.

“It is all very well to send, Arthur,” said Mrs. Carroll, “but the butcher won’t let us have it if we do send.”

“It is no use, Arthur,” Anna Carroll said.  “We cannot get a thing for this man’s dinner, and not only to-day, but to-morrow and while he stays, unless we pay cash.”

Carroll turned to the coachman, who had just come alongside.  “Martin,” he said, “you will have to drive to New Sanderson before dinner.  We cannot get the meat which Mrs. Carroll wishes, and you will have to drive over there.  Go to that large market on Main Street and tell them that I want the best cut of porterhouse with the tenderloin that he has.  Tell him it is for Captain Carroll of Banbridge.  And I want you to get also a roast of lamb for to-morrow.”