"As if a girl with a decent gown on could ride in a street-car!"

"I'm sorry--"

"If you can't afford--"

"I didn't know you were so dependent on carriages--"

It was a pardonable human revenge, but it was the straw. In a flash
Milly stripped the big diamond from her finger and dramatically held it
forth to him.

"Here's your ring," she said.

"Milly!..."

It isn't wise to follow such a scene any further. I do not know that
Milly finally flung the ring at her lover, though she was capable of
doing it like an angry child. At any rate the symbolic circle of
harmonious union lay on the floor between them when Grandma Ridge
arrived, stealthily coming from behind the portieres, her little gray
shawl hugged tight about her narrow shoulders.

"Why, Milly--what is this? Clarence!"

"It means that I'm not going to marry a man who cares more for his money
than for me," Milly said bluntly, picking up her wraps and stalking out
of the room. She paused in the hall, however, long enough to hear her
former lover say dolefully,--

"She don't love me, Mrs. Ridge. That's the trouble--Milly don't really
love me."

And she added from the hall:--

"Clarence is quite right, grandma. I don't love him--and what's more,
I'm never going to marry a man I can't love for all the money in the
world!"

With this defiant proclamation of principle Milly ascended to her room.

What passed between Mrs. Ridge and the discarded Clarence, it is
needless to relate. Even Mrs. Ridge became convinced after a time that
the rupture was both inevitable and irrevocable. Parker at last left the
house, and it must be added took with him the ring which had been
recovered from the floor.

After he had gone Mrs. Ridge knocked at Milly's door. But an obstinate
silence prevailed, and so she went away. Milly was sitting on her bed,
tears dropping from her eyes, tears of rage and mortification and
disappointment. She realized that she had failed, after all, in doing
what she had set out to do, and angry as she still was, disgusted with
Clarence's thin and parsimonious nature, she was beginning,
nevertheless, to be conscious of her own folly.

"I never liked him," she said to herself over and over, in justification
for her rash act. "I couldn't bear him near me. I only did it for Dad's
sake. And I could not, that's all there is to it--I just couldn't.... We
should have fought all the time--cold, mean little thing."

After a time she undressed and w