ooked at me with curiosity.

"I suppose they would be hard words to say if one really felt them,"
she said comprehendingly.

"But I'm not jealous!" I longed to shout, but before we could say
anything further, Monty Saunders and a girl danced past us.

"So you brought it off?" said Lydia, looking after the receding pair.

"How did you know?" Felicia demanded.

"He told her," explained little Cecilia Bennett, "when Lydia asked him
how you could stand him around so much, he told her you were helping
him out with Mildred--telling him what to do and keeping his courage
up. He told me, too," pursued Cecilia, with the importance one
naturally feels when one is in the thick of the battle of life. "He
says it's awful to see a proposal before you, and the only way really
is to stumble on it before you know you've made up your mind."

"Poor boy," remarked Lydia. "I should find Mildred formidable myself.
Six feet and muscle!"

"Poor boy!" Felicia exclaimed resentfully. "Poor tattle-tale, going
around telling everybody when he made me promise not to tell a soul.
That's the last time I keep a secret."

That is all the others heard Felicia say, but to me her words meant
golden music, and they told me a hundred different things; they healed
my wounds, they dispelled the clouds from my soul; but, above all the
tumult of my heart, I shouted down to that stupid inner fellow words
of self-congratulation, of how well, how wisely, temperately, I had
acted throughout, and I thanked Heaven that I was constitutionally
unable to make a fool of myself, whatever evil counsellors lodged in
the house I call my "self." But, Felicia, a word from you would have
put forty hours more of sound sleep between me and old age! And what
business, after all, had Felicia "helping out" that silly boy? A
married woman has her home and her husband to think about--besides
Felicia is too pretty--and that I was right is abundantly shown by the
first thing Felicia said to me in the carriage.

"The idiot," she confessed, "told me before he went off to propose to
Mildred that he didn't care whether she accepted him or not!" And I
only held Felicia's hand very tight.

"I didn't think," Felicia went on in a wan little voice, "that you
cared."

There was something she wanted me to answer very much, and not being
quite sure what it was, I still kept silence--not wanting to say the
wrong thing.

"_I'm_ not proud anyway," she went on bravely. "Couldn't you say t