d bye, "I wonder, now," he reflected,
aloud, "if you can give any reason--any possible reason--why you
shouldn't be locked up in the nearest sanatorium?"

"You needn't be rude, you know," a voice observed from the
neighbourhood of the ruffles, "because there isn't anything you can do
about it."

Mr. Woods ventured a series of inarticulate observations. "But why?"
he concluded, desperately. "But why, Peggy?--in Heaven's name, what's
the meaning of all this?"

She looked up. Billy was aware of two large blue stars; his heart
leapt; and then he recalled a pair of gray-green eyes that had
regarded him in much the same fashion not long ago, and he groaned.

"I was unfair to you last night," she said, and the ring of her odd,
deep voice, and the richness and sweetness of it, moved him to faint
longing, to a sick heart-hunger. It was tremulous, too, and very
tender. "Yes, I was unutterably unfair, Billy. You asked me to marry
you when you thought I was a beggar, and--and Uncle Fred _ought_ to
have left you the money. It was on account of me that he didn't, you
know. I really owed it to you. And after the way I talked to you--so
long as I had the money--I--and, anyhow, its very disagreeable and
eccentric and _horrid_ of you to object to being rich!" Margaret
concluded, somewhat incoherently.

She had not thought it would be like this. He seemed so stern.

But, "Isn't that exactly like her?" Mr. Woods was demanding of his
soul. "She thinks she has been unfair to me--to me, whom she doesn't
care a button for, mind you. So she hands over a fortune to make up
for it, simply because that's the first means that comes to hand! Now,
isn't that perfectly unreasonable, and fantastic, and magnificent, and
incredible?--in short, isn't that Peggy all over? Why, God bless her,
her heart's bigger than a barn-door! Oh, it's no wonder that fellow
Kennaston was grinning just now when he sent me to her! He can afford
to grin."

Aloud, he stated, "You're an angel, Peggy that's what you are. I've
always suspected it, and I'm glad to know it now for a fact. But in
this prosaic world not even angels are allowed to burn up wills for
recreation. Why, bless my soul, child, you--why, there's no telling
what trouble you might have gotten into!"

Miss Hugonin pouted. "You needn't be such a grandfather," she
suggested, helpfully.

"But it's a serious business," he insisted. At this point Billy began
to object to her pouting as distracting one's