"Do you like my hair?"
"I miss the braids."
She nodded. "I know. I cried all night after I had them cut. I felt as if I ought to put them in an urn like the ashes of the dead."
"If you felt that way, why did you do it?"
"Daddy wanted it. I did it to please him."
He wondered what had become of her old independence of action. A year ago she would not have cut her hair to please Louis Carew.
"There's Daddy now," she said, and rose.
Carew came in with Merry, and with Merry's uncle, old Buchanan Meriweather.
Old Meriweather, having greeted the others, sat in a corner and talked to Sally.
"My dear child, I knew your father. And Merry has told me about you. I feel as if we were old friends."
"What did Merry tell you?"
He smiled. "How pretty you are."
"What else?"
"And how gay."
"What else?"
"That you walked in a wood and that a Wolf ate you up!"
"Oh . . . and what else?"
"That you are his little friend, and that he has this marriage of yours much on his mind."
"Has he? Well, I have it a bit on my own mind. But what's the use? It's too late to draw back."
He laid his thin old hand over her slender one. "My dear, Merry read to me parts of your letters from
