good. I didn't say I knew this rumour was true. I only said I'd heard
it."

"When? When did you hear it!"

"Oh, months ago!" And Fanny found any further postponement of laughter
impossible.

"Fanny, you're a hard-hearted creature," Isabel said gently. "You really
are. Don't pay any attention to her, George. Fred Kinney's only a clerk
in his uncle's hardware place: he couldn't marry for ages--even if
anybody would accept him!"

George breathed tumultuously. "I don't care anything about 'ages'!
What's that got to do with it?" he said, his thoughts appearing to
be somewhat disconnected. "Ages,' don't mean anything! I only want to
know--I want to know--I want--" He stopped.

"What do you want?" his father asked crossly.

"Why don't you say it? Don't make such a fuss."

"I'm not--not at all," George declared, pushing his chair back from the
table.

"You must finish your dinner, dear," his mother urged. "Don't--"

"I have finished. I've eaten all I want. I don't want any more than
I wanted. I don't want--I--" He rose, still incoherent. "I prefer--I
want--Please excuse me!"

He left the room, and a moment later the screens outside the open front
door were heard to slam:

"Fanny! You shouldn't--"

"Isabel, don't reproach me, he did have plenty of dinner, and I only
told the truth: everybody has been saying--"

"But there isn't any truth in it."

"We don't actually know there isn't," Miss Fanny insisted, giggling.
"We've never asked Lucy."

"I wouldn't ask her anything so absurd!"

"George would," George's father remarked. "That's what he's gone to do."

Mr. Minafer was not mistaken: that was what his son had gone to do. Lucy
and her father were just rising from their dinner table when the stirred
youth arrived at the front door of the new house. It was a cottage,
however, rather than a house; and Lucy had taken a free hand with the
architect, achieving results in white and green, outside, and white and
blue, inside, to such effect of youth and daintiness that her father
complained of "too much spring-time!" The whole place, including his own
bedroom, was a young damsel's boudoir, he said, so that nowhere could
he smoke a cigar without feeling like a ruffian. However, he was
smoking when George arrived, and he encouraged George to join him in
the pastime, but the caller, whose air was both tense and preoccupied,
declined with something like agitation.

"I never smoke--that is, I'm seldom--I mean, no than