well avoid looking up, she exclaimed--

"Dear me, how vexatious! there goes another of those buttons. I shall
have to sew it on again before I go," and she looked at him with a
charmingly frank air of asking for sympathy, at the same time that it
conveyed the obvious idea that she ought to lose no time in making the
necessary repairs.

"I will not keep you, then," he said, somewhat sadly, and turned away.

Was the accident intentional? Did she want to avoid him? he could not
help the thought, and yet what could be more frank and sunshiny than the
smile with which she responded to his parting salutation?

The next Sunday Laura and he were at church in the evening.

"I wonder why Madeline was not out. Do you know?" he said as they were
walking home.

"No."

"You're not nearly so friendly with her as you used to be. What's the
matter?"

She did not reply, for just then at a turning of the street, they met the
young lady of whom they were speaking. She looked smiling and happy, and
very handsome, with a flush in either cheek, and walking with her was the
new drug-clerk. She seemed a little confused at meeting Henry, and for a
moment appeared to avoid his glance. Then, with a certain bravado, oddly
mingled with a deprecating air, she raised her eyes to his and bowed.

It was the first intimation he had had of the true reason of her
alienation. Mechanically he walked on and on, too stunned to think as
yet, feeling only that there was a terrible time of thinking ahead.

"Hadn't we better turn back, hear?" said Laura, very gently.

He looked up. They were a mile or two out of the village on a lonely
country road. They turned, and she said, softly, in the tone like the
touch of tender fingers on an aching spot--

"I knew it long ago, but I hadn't the heart to tell you. She set her cap
at him from the first. Don't take it too much to heart. She is not good
enough for you."

Sweet compassion! Idle words! Is there any such sense of ownership,
reaching even to the feeling of identity, as that which the lover has in
the one he loves? His thoughts and affections, however short the time,
had so grown about her and encased her, as the hardened clay imbeds the
fossil flower buried ages ago. It rather seems as if he had found her by
quarrying in the depths of his own heart than as if he had picked her
from the outside world, from among foreign things. She was never foreign,
else he could not have had that intuitive sense o