would I save to undo the trouble I have most innocently made. What
must you have thought of me that day at Lenox, staying close all day
to two engaged people, who must have wished me away a thousand times?
But I did not dream you were engaged.

"Remember, I had just come over from Saratoga, and knew nothing of
Lenox gossip, then or afterward. Something in your manner once or
twice made me look at you and think that perhaps you were _interested_
in Bessie, but hers to you was so cold, so distant, that I thought it
was only a notion of my jealous self.

"Was I foolish to lay so much stress on that anniversary time? Do you
know that the year before we had spent it together, too?--September
28th. True, that year it was at Bertie Cox's funeral, but we had
walked together, and I was happy in being near you.

"For, you see, it was from something more than the Hudson River that
you had brought me out. You had rescued me from the stupid gayety of
my first winter--from the flats of fashionable life. You had given me
an ideal--something to live up to and grow worthy of.

"Let that pass. For myself, it is nothing, but for the deeper harm I
have done, I fear, to Bessie and to you.

"Again, on that day at Lenox, when Bessie and I drove together in the
afternoon, I tried to make her talk about you, to find out what you
were to her. But she was so distant, so repellant, that I fancied
there was nothing at all between you; or, rather, if you had cared for
her at all, that she had been indifferent to you.

"Indeed, she quite forbade the subject by her manner; and when she
told me you were going abroad, I could not help being very happy, for
I thought then that I should have you all to myself.

"When I saw you on shipboard, I fancied, somehow, that you had changed
your passage to be with us. It was very foolish; and I write it,
thankful that you are not here to see me. So I scribbled a little note
to Bessie, and sent it off by the pilot: I don't know where you were
when the pilot went. This is, as nearly as I remember it, what I
wrote:

"'DEAR BESSIE: Charlie Munro is on board. He must have
changed his passage to be with us. I know from something
that he has just told _me_ that this is so, and that he
consoles himself already for your coldness. You remember
what I told you when we talked about him. I shall _try_ now.
F.M.'

"Bessie would know what that meant. Oh, must I tell you what a weak,
weak girl