great deal. I am being very frank with you, Randy, because we have
always talked things out. I think of him, and wonder which is the real
man--the one I thought he was--and I thought him very fine and
splendid. Or is he just trifling and commonplace? Perhaps he is just
between, not as wonderful as I thought him, nor as contemptible as I
seem forced to believe.

"Yet I gave him something that it is hard to take back. I gave a great
deal. You see I had always been shut up in a glass case like the
bob-whites and the sandpipers in the Bird Room, and I knew nothing of
the world. And the first time I tried my wings, I thought I was flying
towards the sun, and it was just a blaze that--burned me.

"Of course you are right when you say that you won't marry me unless I
love you. I had a queer feeling at first about it--as if you were very
far away and I couldn't reach you. But I know that you are right, and
that you are thinking of the thing that is best for me. But I know I
shall always have you as a friend. I don't think that I shall ever
love anybody. And after this we won't talk about it. There are so
many other things that we have to say to each other that don't hurt----"

Becky could not, of course, know the effect of her letter on Randy.
The night after its receipt, he roamed the woods. She had thought him
cruel--and dreadful. Well, let her think it. He was glad that he had
dropped George in the fountain. He should always be glad. But women
were not like that--they were tender--and hated--hardness. Perhaps
that was because they were--mothers----

And men were--hard. He had been hard, perhaps, in the things he had
said in his letter. Her words rang in his ears. "I had a queer
feeling at first that you were very far away, and that I could not
reach you." And she had said that, when his soul ached to have her
near.

Yet he had tried to do the best that he could for Becky. He had felt
that she must not be bound by a tie that was no longer needed to
protect her from Dalton. She was safe at 'Sconset, with the Admiral
and her new friends the Copes. He envied them their hours with her.
He was desperately lonely, with a loneliness which had no hope.

He worked intensively. The boarders had gone from King's Crest, and he
and the Major had moved into the big house. Randy spent a good deal of
time in the Judge's library at Huntersfield. He and Truxton had great
plans for their future. They read l