anything better!
And now she--I assure you I'm doing the best I can do for her. I do
honestly assure you! If anybody can suggest to me anything else that I
can do--I'll do it like a shot." He threw up his arms.

Hilda was touched by the benevolence of his tone. Nevertheless, it only
intensified her helpless perplexity. Sarah Gailey was inexpressibly to
be pitied, but George Cannon was not to be blamed. She had a feeling
that for any piteous disaster some one ought to be definitely blamable.

"Do you think she'll settle down?" George Cannon asked, in a new voice.

"Oh yes!" said Hilda. "I think she will. It was just a sort of--attack
she had, I think."

"She's not vexed with me?"

Hilda could not find courage to say: "She thinks you and I are plotting
against her." And yet she wondered why she should hesitate to say it.
After a pause she murmured, as casually as possible: "She doesn't like
the Boutwoods coming back."

"I knew you were going to say that!" he frowned.

"If you could manage to stop them--"

"No, no!" He interrupted--nervous, impatient. "It wouldn't do, that
wouldn't! It'd never do! A boarding-house can't be run on those lines.
It isn't that I care so much as all that about losing a couple of
boarders, and I'm not specially keen on the Boutwoods. But it wouldn't
do! It's the wrong principle. You haven't got to let customers get on
your nerves, so long as they pay and behave respectably. If I gave way,
the very first thing Sarah would do would be to find a grievance against
some other boarder, and there'd be no end to it. The fact is she wants a
grievance, she must have a grievance--whether it's the Boutwoods or
somebody else makes no matter!... Oh no!" He repeated softly, gently,
"Oh no!"

She knew that his argument was unanswerable. She was perfectly aware
that she ought to yield to it. Nevertheless, the one impulse of her
being in that moment was to fight blindly and irrationally against it.
Her instinct said: "I don't care for arguments. The Boutwoods must be
stopped from coming. If they aren't stopped, I don't know what I shall
do! I can't bear to think of that poor woman meeting them again! I can't
bear it." She drew breath sharply. Startling hot tears came into her
eyes; and she stepped forward on her left foot.

"Please!" she entreated, "please don't let them come!"

There was a silence. In the agonizing silence she felt acutely her
girlishness, her helplessness, her unreason, confronted