shire; and both
families expected the marriage to take place as soon as he got back. It
seems the girl is an heiress (you know _how low_ the English ideals are
compared with ours), and Miss Bruce-Pringle said his relations were
perfectly delighted at his 'being provided for,' as she called it.
Well, when he got back he asked the girl to release him; and she and
her family were furious, and so were his people; but he holds out, and
won't marry her, and won't give a reason, except that he has 'formed an
unfortunate attachment.' Did you ever hear anything so peculiar? His
aunt, who is quite wild about it, says it must have happened at
Wentworth, because he didn't go anywhere else in America. Do you
suppose it _could_ have been the Brant girl? But why 'unfortunate' when
everybody knows she would have jumped at him?"

Margaret folded the letter and looked out across the river. It was not
the same river, but a mystic current shot with moonlight. The bare
willows wove a leafy veil above her head, and beside her she felt the
nearness of youth and tempestuous tenderness. It had all happened just
here, on this very seat by the river--it had come to her, and passed
her by, and she had not held out a hand to detain it....

Well! Was it not, by that very abstention, made more deeply and
ineffaceably hers? She could argue thus while she had thought the
episode, on his side, a mere transient effect of propinquity; but now
that she knew it had altered the whole course of his life, now that it
took on substance and reality, asserted a separate existence outside of
her own troubled consciousness--now it seemed almost cowardly to have
missed her share in it.

She walked home in a dream. Now and then, when she passed an
acquaintance, she wondered if the pain and glory were written on her
face. But Mrs. Sperry, who stopped her at the corner of Maverick Street
to say a word about the next meeting of the Higher Thought Club, seemed
to remark no change in her.

When she reached home Ransom had not yet returned from the office, and
she went straight to the library to tidy his writing-table. It was part
of her daily duty to bring order out of the chaos of his papers, and of
late she had fastened on such small recurring tasks as some one falling
over a precipice might snatch at the weak bushes in its clefts.

When she had sorted the letters she took up some pamphlets and
newspapers, glancing over them to see if they were to be kept. Among
t