d in her bedroom.

Several sheets of foolscap paper covered with large open handwriting lay
upon the table. Upon the first page, with a line ruled beneath it, stood
the title: 'The Diary of a Plain Girl--Notes and Sensations.' She had
just laid aside her pen and was waiting for Cecilia.

'Oh, Alice darling, how are you? I am delighted--I am so delighted to
see you. Let me kiss you, let me see you; I have been longing for you
for weeks--for months.'

Alice bent her face down, and then, holding each other's hands, the
girls stood looking through a deep and expressive silence into each
other's eyes.

'I wish, Alice, I could tell you how glad I am to have you back: it
seems like heaven to see you again. You look so nice, so true, so sweet,
so perfect. There never was anyone so perfect as you, Alice.'

'Cecilia dear, you shouldn't talk to me like that; it is absurd. Indeed,
I don't think it is quite right.'

'Not quite right,' replied the cripple sadly; 'what do you mean? Why is
it wrong--why should it be wrong for me to love you?'

'I don't mean to say that it is wrong; you misunderstand me;
but--but--well, I don't know how to explain myself, but--'

'I know, I know, I know,' said Cecilia, and her nervous sensitivity
revealed thoughts in Alice's mind--thoughts of which Alice herself was
not distinctly conscious, just as a photograph exposes irregularities in
the texture of a leaf that the naked eye would not perceive.

'If Harding were to speak to you so, you wouldn't think it wrong.'

Alice's face flushed a little, and she said, with a certain resoluteness
in her voice, 'Cecilia, I wish you wouldn't talk to me in this way. You
give me great pain.'

'I am sorry if I do, but I can't help it. I am jealous of the words that
are spoken to you, of the air you breathe, of the ground you walk upon.
How, then, can I help hating that man?'

'I do not wish to argue this point with you, Cecilia, nor am I sure that
I understand it. There is no one I like better than you, dear, but that
we should be jealous of each other is absurd.'

'For you perhaps, but not for me.' Cecilia looked at Alice
reproachfully, and at the end of a long and morose silence she said:

'You received the long letter I wrote to you about him?'

'Yes, Cecilia, and I answered it. It seems to me very foolish to
pronounce condemnatory opinion on the whole world; and particularly for
you who have seen so little of it.'

'That doesn't matter. People a