chance to continue the
conversation. As soon as she appeared on the veranda, where Dory and
Arthur were smoking, Arthur sauntered away. She was alone with Dory; but
she felt that she had nothing to say to him. The surge of fury against
Ross and Theresa had subsided; also, now that she had seen Theodore
Hargrave again, she realized that he was not the sort of man one tries to
use for the purpose she had on impulse formed, nor she the sort of woman
who, in the deliberateness of the second thought, carries into effect an
impulse to such a purpose.

When they had sat there in the moonlight several minutes in silence, she
said: "I find I haven't anything especial to say to you, after all."

A wait, then from him: "I'm sorry. I had hoped--" He halted.

"Hoped--what?"

"Hoped it was off with you and Whitney."

"Has some one been saying it was?" she asked sharply.

"No. I thought I felt it when I first saw you."

"Oh!" she said, enormously relieved. A pause, then constrainedly, "Your
guess was right."

"And was that why you sent for me?"

The assent of silence.

"You thought perhaps you might--care for--me?"

It seemed almost true, with him looking so earnestly and hopefully at
her, and in the moonlight--moonlight that can soften even falsehood until
true and false seem gently to merge. She hesitated to say No. "I don't
know just what I thought," she replied.

But her tone jarred on the young man whose nerves were as sensitive as a
thermostat. "You mean, when you saw me again, you felt you really didn't
care," he said, drawing back so that she could not see his face.

"No," she replied, earnestly and honestly. "Not that." And then she flung
out the truth. "Ross has engaged himself to Theresa Howland, a girl with
a huge big fortune. And I--I--"

"You needn't say it," he interrupted, feeling how it was distressing her
to confess. "I understand."

"I wasn't altogether--wicked," she pleaded. "I didn't think of you wholly
because I thought you cared for me. I thought of you chiefly because I
feel more at home with you than with anyone else. It has always seemed to
me that you see me exactly as I am, with all the pretenses and
meannesses--yet not unkindly, either. And, while you've made me angry
sometimes, when you have refused to be taken in by my best tricks, still
it was as one gets angry with--with oneself. It simply wouldn't last.
And, as you see, I tell you anything and everything."

"You thought you'd engag