my especial friend long befoah I
evah heard of Bernice Howe! Why, at the very first Valentine pahty I
evah went to, he gave me the little silvah arrow he won in the archery
contest, for me to remembah him by. I've got it on this very minute."

She put her hand up to the little silver pin that fastened the lace of
her surplice collar. "Malcolm _always has_ called himself my devoted
knight, and he--"

She paused. There were some things she could not repeat; that scene on
the churchyard stile the winter day they went for Christmas greens, when
he had begged her for a talisman, and his low-spoken reply, "I'll be
whatever you want me to be, Lloyd." There were other times, too, of
which she could not speak. The night of the tableaux was the last one,
when she had strolled down the moonlighted paths with him at The
Beeches, and he had insisted that it was the "glad morrow" by his
calendar, and time for her Sir Feal to tell her many things, especially
as he was going away for the rest of the summer on a long yachting trip,
and somebody else might tell her the same things in his absence. So many
years she had taken his devotion as a matter of course, that it provoked
her beyond measure to have Bernice insinuate that she had angled for it.

Lloyd knew girls who did such things; who delighted in proving that they
had a superior power of attraction, and who would not scruple to use all
sorts of mean little underhand ways to lessen a man's admiration for
some other girl, and appropriate it for themselves. She had even heard
some of the girls at school boast of such things.

"For pity's sake, Lloyd!" one of them had said, "don't look at me that
way. 'All's fair in love and war,' and a girl's title to popularity is
based on the number of scalp-locks she takes."

Lloyd had despised her for that speech, and now to have Bernice openly
say that she was capable of such an action was more than she could
endure calmly. She set her teeth together hard, and gripped the little
fan she still happened to be carrying, as if it were some live thing she
was trying to strangle.

"And she said," Mary added, slowly, reluctant to add fuel to the flame,
yet unable to withstand the impelling force of Lloyd's eyes, which
demanded the whole truth, "she said that she had been sure for some time
that Mr. Shelby was just on the verge of proposing to her, and that, if
you succeeded in playing the same game with him that you did with
Malcolm, she'd get eve