an impression that she was
holding back tears. At any rate, when she lifted her head again, her
face wore a cold little stare that he had never seen before, and that
seemed to hold him at arm's length.

"I'm quite alone with the people I have to live among," she said. "I'm
not like them, and I don't care for them."

"Am I one of your kind?" Dick asked. He reviled himself the next moment
for having said so much, but Lena seemed to draw no inferences, though
her color heightened a little as she answered:

"Oh, you! There's only one of you, unfortunately. You are a little oasis
in my desert. I'm very grateful for you, but--"

Lena had said such things before. Dick began to revolve plans for a
larger kindness, and, in his slow masculine intellect, fancied that it
was all his own idea to try and bring this small person into contact
with those who would appreciate her and with whom she could be
happy,--for of course Lena herself was quite submissive to her lot.

To Dick's friends this long summer dawdled itself away much as the
previous one had done. There were the same week-ends at the lake, with
Dick more full of vivacity than ever, Ellery growing more certain of
himself, Madeline rounding slowly out of girlhood into womanhood. Yet
there was a difference. Half a dozen Sundays, when Percival was too
busy, Ellery, half-irritated with his friend, half-exultant in his
desertion, spent the quiet afternoons _a deux_ with Madeline.

It seemed to Norris that some indefinable change was coming over Dick.
At times he was vivid, even fantastic, and again he lapsed into erratic
silences out of which he came at new and unexpected points. He developed
ideas that appeared to his friend not quite in keeping with the sterling
Dick of old. He was less sensitive, so thought Ellery, in his code of
honor as he saw more and more of the crooked ways of men. Once Norris
met him walking with one of the cheaper aldermen, and he wore a
duplicate--in gilt--of the alderman's walk and swagger. He talked
politics and reform, but with less emphasis on his ideals and more on
the game, which seemed to mean the fun of catching the rascals
red-handed and turning them out.

Madeline, as Ellery studied her, was unaware of any change either in
Dick himself or in his attitude toward her. It was like her to be above
suspicions or small jealousies.

So summer slipped into October, and there came a month of lovely days.
Winter, after a feint, slunk into hid