no such serious view of it as did her parents and his. The most
she could do with her father was to persuade him to suspend
sentence pending the conclusion of an investigation into Jack's
doings at the University of Michigan and in Detroit. Colonel
Gardiner was not so narrow or so severe as Jack said or as
Pauline thought. He loved his daughter; so he inquired
thoroughly. He knew that his daughter loved Dumont; so he judged
liberally. When he had done he ordered the engagement broken and
forbade Dumont the house.

"He is not wild merely; he is--worse than you can imagine,"
said the colonel to his wife, in concluding his account of his
discoveries and of Dumont's evasive and reluctant admissions--an
account so carefully expurgated that it completely misled her.
"Tell Pauline as much as you can--enough to convince her."

This, when Mrs. Gardiner was not herself convinced. She regarded
the colonel as too high-minded to be a fit judge of human
frailty; and his over-caution in explanation had given her the
feeling that he had a standard for a husband for their daughter
which only another such rare man as himself could live up to.
Further, she had always been extremely reserved in
mother-and-daughter talk with Pauline, and thus could not now
give her a clear idea of what little she had been able to gather
from Colonel Gardiner's half-truths. This typical enacting of a
familiar domestic comedy-tragedy had the usual result: the girl
was confirmed in her original opinion and stand.

"Jack's been a little too lively," was her unexpressed
conclusion from her mother's dilution of her father's dilution of