y!

"You care for some one else?"

Milly nodded, and her eyes dropped tears fast. It all seemed very sad,
almost tragic. She was sorry for herself as well as for him....

If he felt it inexplicable that he had not been allowed to suspect this
deep attachment before, he was too much of a man to mention it. He took
his blow and did not argue about it.

"I'm so sorry!" Milly cried.

"It had to be," he said, hastily putting out a hand to her. "I shall
love you always, Milly!" (It was the thing they said in books, but in
this case it sounded forlornly true.) "I'm glad I've had the chance to
love you," and he was gone.

Milly dropped tears all the way upstairs to her room, where she shut
herself in and locked herself against family intrusion. In spite of her
tears she was glad for what she had done. A woman's heart seemed to her
ample justification for inconsistencies, even if it jammed other hearts
on the way to its goal. It was fate, that was all,--fate that Jack
Bragdon should have walked into her life just twelve days before it
would have been too late. Fate is a wondrously consoling word,
especially in the concerns of the heart. It absolves from personal
responsibility.

So Milly went to sleep, with tears still on her eyelashes, but a smile
on her lips, and dreamed of her own happy fate. At last "the real, right
thing" was hers!

X

MILLY MARRIES

She awoke with a sensation of bliss--a never ending happiness to be
hers. Yet there were some disagreeable episodes before this bliss could
be perfected. For one thing Horatio took the announcement of the new
engagement very hard,--unexpectedly so. Grandma Ridge received it in
stony silence with a sarcastic curve to her wrinkled lips, as if to
say,--"Hope you know your mind this time!" But Horatio spluttered:--

"What? You don't mean that la-di-da newspaper pup who parts his hair in
the middle?"

(To part one's hair in the middle instead of upon the slope of the head
was Horatio's aversion--it indicated to him a lack of serious, masculine
purpose in a young man.)

"I thought you would do better than that, Milly.... What's he making
with his newspaper pictures?"

"I don't know," Milly replied loftily.

She might guess that it was in the neighborhood of thirty dollars a
week, sometimes increased by a few dollars through a magazine cover or
commercial poster. But in her present exalted mood it was completely
indifferent to Milly whether her lover was e