After supper Talbert took me to the summer-house at the foot of the garden to smoke.  Our first cigars were about half burned out when he began to unbosom himself.

“I’ve been a fool,” he said, “an idiot, and, what is more, an unnatural and neglectful father, cruel to my children when I meant to be kind, a shirker of my duty, and a bringer of trouble on those that I love best.”

“As for example?” I asked.

“Well, it is Peggy!” he broke out.  “You know, I like her best of them all, next to Ada; can’t help it.  She is nearer to me, somehow.  The finest, most unselfish little girl!  But I’ve been just selfish enough to let her get into trouble, and be talked about, and have her heart broken, and now they’ve put her into a position where she’s absolutely helpless, a pawn in their fool game, and the Lord only knows what’s to come of it all unless he makes me man enough to do my duty.”

From this, of course, I had to have the whole story, and I must say it seemed to me most extraordinary—­a flagrant case of idiotic interference.  Peggy had been sent away to one of those curious institutions that they call a “coeducational college,” chiefly because Maria had said that she ought to understand the duties of modern womanhood; she had gone, without the slightest craving for “the higher education,” but naturally with the idea of having a “good time”; and apparently she had it, for she came home engaged to a handsome, amatory boy, one of her fellow “students,” named Goward.  At this point Aunt Elizabeth, with her red hair and pink frock, had interfered and lured off the Goward, who behaved in a manner which appeared to me to reduce him to a negligible quantity.  But the family evidently did not think so, for they all promptly began to interfere, Maria and Charles Edward and Alice and even Billy, each one with an independent plan, either to lure the Goward back or to eliminate him.  Alice had the most original idea, which was to marry Peggy to Dr. Denbigh; but this clashed with Maria’s idea, which was to entangle the doctor with Aunt Elizabeth in order that the Goward might be recaptured.  It was all extremely complicated and unnecessary (from my point of view), and of course it transpired and circulated through the gossip of the town, and poor Peggy was much afflicted and ashamed.  Now the engagement was off; Aunt Elizabeth had gone into business with a clairvoyant woman in New York; Goward was in the hospital with a broken arm, and Peggy was booked to go to Europe on Saturday with Charles Edward and Lorraine.

“Quite right,” I exclaimed at this point in the story.  “Everything has turned out just as it should, like a romance in an old-fashioned ladies’ magazine.”

“Not at all,” broke out Talbert; “you don’t know the whole of it, Maria has told me” (oh, my prophetic soul, Maria!) “that Charley and his wife have asked a friend of theirs, a man named Dane, ten years older than Peggy, a professor in that blank coeducational college, to go with them, and that she is sure they mean to make her marry him.”