lt.

"Why should I hate you?" countered the other side.

"I should think you would. I forced the thing on you."

"I need not have done it."

"But being you, and always thinking about making some one else happy
and comfortable----"

"Oh, if only they don't find it out over there!" she burst out. "If
they do and I have to leave, with Jim----"

Here, realising that she was going to cry and not caring to screw up
her face before any one, she put her arms on the stand and buried
her face in them. Her stiff tulle cap almost touched Billy Grant's
arm.

Billy Grant had a shocked second.

"Jim?"

"My little brother," from the table.

Billy Grant drew a long breath of relief. For a moment he had
thought----

"I wonder--whether I dare to say something to you." Silence from the
table and presumably consent. "Isn't he--don't you think that--I
might be allowed to--to help Jim? It would help me to like myself
again. Just now I'm not standing very high with myself."

"Won't you tell me why you did it?" she said, suddenly sitting up,
her arms still out before her on the table. "Why did you coax so?
You said it was because of a little property you had, but--that
wasn't it--was it?"

"No."

"Or because you cared a snap for me." This was affirmation, not
question.

"No, not that, though I----"

She gave a hopeless little gesture of despair.

"Then--why? Why?"

"For one of the meanest reasons I know--to be even with some people
who had treated me badly."

The thing was easier now. His flat denial of any sentimental reason
had helped to make it so.

"A girl that you cared about?"

"Partly that. The girl was a poor thing. She didn't care enough to
be hurt by anything I did. But the people who made the trouble----"

Now a curious thing happened. Billy Grant found at this moment that
he no longer hated the Lindley Grants. The discovery left him
speechless--that he who had taken his hate into the very valley of
death with him should now find himself thinking of both Lindley and
his wife with nothing more bitter than contempt shocked him. A state
of affairs existed for which his hatred of the Lindley Grants was
alone responsible; now the hate was gone and the state of affairs
persisted.

"I should like," said Billy Grant presently, "to tell you a
little--if it will not bore you--about myself and the things I have
done that I shouldn't, and about the girl. And of course, you know,
I'm--I'm not going to hold you t