t. Shall I put it back in the drawer?"

"Don't you think it's a pretty watch?"

"Yes. Shall I put it back?"

"You haven't any watch, Madelon."

"I don't want one." Madelon closed the case impatiently, and turned
away.

"Oh, Madelon, won't you take it?" Lot begged, piteously.

"I told you no--I do not care for it." Madelon put the case back in
the desk drawer. Then she drew her cloak together, and went to the
door again.

"Oh," said Lot Gordon, weakly, in his hoarse voice, "the hardest
thing in the whole world for Love to bruise himself against is the
tender heart of a woman, when 'tis not inclined his way."

"Good-bye," said Madelon, and shut the door behind her fiercely. That
last speech of Lot's, which, like many of his speeches, seemed to her
no human vernacular, added terror to her aversion of him. "He's more
like a book than a man," she had often thought, and the fancy seized
her now that the great leather-bound book upon his knees, and all
those leather-bound books against his walls, had somehow possessed
him with an uncanny life of their own.

And she may have been in a measure right, for Lot Gordon, during his
whole life, had dealt indirectly with human hearts through their
translations in his beloved books rather than with the beating hearts
of men and women around him. Still, although he spoke like one who
learns a language from books instead of the familiar converse of
people, and his thoughts clothed themselves in images which those
about him disdained and threw off as impeding their hard race of
life, poor Lot Gordon's heart beat in time with the hearts of his
kind. But that Madelon could not know because hers was so set against
it.

She hurried out of the house and the yard, dreading again lest she
should encounter Burr. But her haste was of no avail, for he came
straight down his opposite terraces, and met her when she reached the
road.

She would have pushed past then, but he stood squarely before her.
"Madelon, can't I speak with you a minute?" he pleaded. Madelon saw,
without seeming to look, that Burr's handsome face was white as death
and haggard.

"Are you sick?" she asked, suddenly. "Why do you look so? What is the
matter with you?" and she put a half-bitter, half-anxiously
compassionate weight upon the _you_.

"I believe I am going mad," Burr groaned, with the quick grasp of a
man at the pity of the woman he loves. "Oh, Madelon!" He held out
his hands towards her like a child