naughtily
trifled with danger, stands aghast at the calamity which his
perverseness has caused. She was positively affrighted. She reflected in
her terror: "I asked for this, and I've got it!"

George Cannon stooped and picked up his little bag. There he towered,
high and massive, above her! And she felt acutely her slightness, her
girlishness, and her need of his help. She could not afford to transform
sympathy into antipathy. She was alone in the world. Never before had
she realized, as she realized then, the lurking terror of her
loneliness. The moment was critical. In another moment he might be gone
from the room, and she left solitary to irremediable humiliation and
self-disgust.

"Please!" she whispered appealingly. The whole of her being became an
appeal--the glance, the gesture, the curve of the slim and fragile body.
She was like a slave. She had no pride, no secret reserve of thought.
She was an instinct. Tears showed in her eyes and affected her voice.

He gave the twisted, difficult, rather foolish smile of one who is
cursing the mortification of a predicament into which he has been cast
through no fault of his own.

"Please what?"

"Please sit down."

He waved a hand, deprecatingly, and obeyed.

"It's all right," he said. "All right! I ought to have known--" Then he
smiled generously.

"Known what?" Her voice was now weak and liquid with woe.

"You'd be likely to be upset."

Not furtively, but openly, she wiped her eyes.

"No, no!" she protested honestly. "It's not that. It's--but--I'm very
sorry."

"I reckon I know a bit what worry is, myself!" he added, with a brief,
almost harsh, laugh.

These strange words struck her with pity.

III

"Well, now,"--he seemed to be beginning again--let's leave Lessways
Street for a minute.... I can sell the Calder Street property for you,
if you like. And at a pretty good price. Sooner or later the town will
have to buy up all that side of the street. You remember I told your
mother last year but one I could get a customer for it? but she wasn't
having any."

"Yes," said Hilda eagerly; "I remember."

In her heart she apologized to George Cannon, once more, for having
allowed her mother to persuade her, even for a day, that that attempt to
buy was merely a trick on his part invented to open negotiations for the
rent-collecting.

"You know what the net rents are," he went on, "as you've had 'em every
month. I dare say the purchase money if it's