flickered; the drop-light cast a mellow radiance on her face. She let
her eyes fall, and then lifted them for an irrelevant glance at the
clock on the mantel.

"Mother and Irene have gone to the Spanish Students' concert."

"Oh, have they?" asked Corey; and he put his hat, which he had been
holding in his hand, on the floor beside his chair.

She looked down at it for no reason, and then looked up at his face for
no other, and turned a little red. Corey turned a little red himself.
She who had always been so easy with him now became a little
constrained.

"Do you know how warm it is out-of-doors?" he asked.

"No, is it warm? I haven't been out all day."

"It's like a summer night."

She turned her face towards the fire, and then started abruptly.
"Perhaps it's too warm for you here?"

"Oh no, it's very comfortable."

"I suppose it's the cold of the last few days that's still in the
house. I was reading with a shawl on when you came."

"I interrupted you."

"Oh no. I had finished the book. I was just looking over it again."

"Do you like to read books over?"

"Yes; books that I like at all."

"That was it?" asked Corey.

The girl hesitated. "It has rather a sentimental name. Did you ever
read it?--Tears, Idle Tears."

"Oh yes; they were talking of that last night; it's a famous book with
ladies. They break their hearts over it. Did it make you cry?"

"Oh, it's pretty easy to cry over a book," said Penelope, laughing;
"and that one is very natural till you come to the main point. Then
the naturalness of all the rest makes that seem natural too; but I
guess it's rather forced."

"Her giving him up to the other one?"

"Yes; simply because she happened to know that the other one had cared
for him first. Why should she have done it? What right had she?"

"I don't know. I suppose that the self-sacrifice----"

"But it WASN'T self-sacrifice--or not self-sacrifice alone. She was
sacrificing him too; and for some one who couldn't appreciate him half
as much as she could. I'm provoked with myself when I think how I
cried over that book--for I did cry. It's silly--it's wicked for any
one to do what that girl did. Why can't they let people have a chance
to behave reasonably in stories?"

"Perhaps they couldn't make it so attractive," suggested Corey, with a
smile.

"It would be novel, at any rate," said the girl. "But so it would in
real life, I suppose," she added.

"I don't know. W