,
with no trace of ill-humor. "Come in. Here is this wild Alan Macdonald
come bursting in upon us from his hills."

The colonel indicated him with a wave of the hand, and Macdonald
bowed, his heart shrinking when he saw how coldly she returned his
greeting from her place at the door.

"He has come riding," the colonel continued, "with a demand on me to
be allowed to woo you, and carry you off to his cave among the rocks.
Show him the door, and add your testimony to my assurance--which seems
inadequate to satisfy the impetuous gentleman--that his case is
hopeless."

The colonel waved them away with that, and turned again, with his
jerky suddenness, to his telegrams and letters. The colonel had not
meant for Macdonald to pass out of the door through which he had
entered. That was the military portal; the other one, opening into the
hall from which Frances came, was the world's door for entering that
house. And it was in that direction Colonel Landcraft had waved them
when he ordered Frances to take the visitor away.

"This way, Mr. Macdonald, please," said she, politely cold,
unfeelingly formal. For all the warmth that he could discover in her
voice and eyes, or in her white face, so unaccountably severe and
hard, there might never have been a garden with white gravel path, or
a hot hasty kiss given in it--and received.

In the hall the gloom of evening was deepened into darkness that made
her face indistinct, like the glimmering whiteness of the hydrangea
blooms in that past romantic night. She marched straight to the street
door and opened it, and he had no strength in his words to lift even a
small one up to stay her. He believed that he had taken the man's
course and the way of honor in the matter. That it had not been
indorsed by her was evident, he believed.

"There was nothing for me to conceal," said he, as the door opened
upon the gray twilight and glooming trees along the street; "I came in
a man's way, as I thought--"

"You came in a man's way, Mr. Macdonald, to ask the privilege of
attempting to win a woman's hand, when you lack the man's strength or
the man's courage to defend even the glove that covers it," she said.
Her voice was low; it was accusingly scornful.

Macdonald started. "Then it has come back to you?"

"It has come back to me, through a channel that I would have given the
hand that wore it"--she stretched it out as she spoke; it glimmered
like a nebulous star in misty skies there in