't he come to you after I left?"

"Yes."

"I told him to excuse me--"

"He didn't."

"Well, I guess he was pretty badly rattled." Jeff stopped himself in
the vague laugh of one who remembers something ludicrous, and turned his
face away.

"Tell me what it was!" she demanded, nervously.

"Mr. Westover had been home with him once, and he wouldn't stay. He made
Mr. Westover come back for me."

"What did he want with you?"

Jeff shrugged.

"And then what?"

"We went out to the carriage, as soon as I could get away from you; but
he wasn't in it. I sent Mr. Westover back to you and set out to look for
him."

"That was very good of you. And I--thank you for your kindness to my
brother. I shall not forget it. And I wish to beg your pardon."

"What for?" asked Jeff, bluntly.

"For blaming you when you didn't come back for the dance."

If Bessie had meant nothing but what was fitting to the moment some
inherent lightness of nature played her false. But even the histrionic
touch which she could not keep out of her voice, her manner, another
sort of man might have found merely pathetic.

Jeff laughed with subtle intelligence. "Were you very hard on me?"

"Very," she answered in kind, forgetting her brother and the whole
terrible situation.

"Tell me what you thought of me," he said, and he came a little nearer
to her, looking very handsome and very strong. "I should like to know."

"I said I should never speak to you again."

"And you kept your word," said Jeff. "Well, that's all right.
Good-night-or good-morning, whichever it is." He took her hand, which
she could not withdraw, or feigned to herself that she could not
withdraw, and looked at her with a silent laugh, and a hardy, sceptical
glance that she felt take in every detail of her prettiness, her
plainness. Then he turned and went out, and she ran quickly and locked
the door upon him.

XXXV.

Bessie crept up to her room, where she spent the rest of the night
in her chair, amid a tumult of emotion which she would have called
thinking. She asked herself the most searching questions, but she got no
very candid answers to them, and she decided that she must see the whole
fact with some other's eyes before she could know what she had meant or
what she had done.

When she let the daylight into her room, it showed her a face in her
mirror that bore no trace of conflicting anxieties. Her complexion
favored this effect of inward calm; it was alway