being opinionated, for, though requiring them to think out every subject carefully, he yet guided them with a firm hand, giving them in every sort of discussion the wisdom of his wide experience. He was a loving, indulgent father, and the girls adored him, but no sterner disciplinarian ever held sway. Implicit and immediate obedience he demanded—no questioning of his higher authority. 

14

 He taught them, too, much of the old-world philosophy, which he had imbibed from extensive reading. They listened to him wonderingly, their eager young minds drinking in the beauty of what he said, but failing at that age to grasp the breadth and depth of all the truths he told them. Sometimes he almost forgot that they were children. 

 When Julie was twenty and Hester nineteen he took them to Europe. Bridget and Peter Snooks completed the party. They roamed about for a year, and just before they were to sail for home late in the summer Mr. Dale informed the girls that he intended to sell out his large railroad interests; he was tired of their unsettled life, and thought they would all enjoy the novelty of opening their house and taking up their abode in Radnor. Radnor had long ceased to be anything more than a name to the girls, but the 15 proposition opened up joyous possibilities of “making a home for Dad.” 

15

 “I will take you down to Cousin Nancy’s in Virginia when we land,” he had said to them in London, “and leave you there a few weeks; she has been begging for a visit from us this long while. Bridget and I will open the house in Radnor and get everything in order; then you can come up and run the establishment and queen it over your old Dad in royal fashion.” 

 This program had been successfully carried out, except that it could scarcely be said that the girls ran the establishment, for the responsibility lay with Bridget, who assumed the duties of housekeeper—duties she guarded jealously and performed with such skill that there was not a better managed house on the water side of Crana Street. This Radnor people knew through that mysterious agency by which a neighborhood keeps in touch with itself. 

 After years spent in the narrow confines of a car, however luxurious, and the necessarily limited quarters of hotels, the girls reveled in the spacious house, over which they spread themselves in an amusing fashion, sleeping in turn in the various bedrooms by way of getting acquainted with them all over again, Julie said, and with 

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