e could summon up the courage, he would presently destroy them
himself. And she had treated him with great harshness, and wouldn't
she be a good little girl and let him see her, if only for a few
minutes, before she went away?

Mary Virginia tore up the note and returned the violets by way of
answer.

When she returned to school, the superioress regretted that she had
been allowed to visit Mrs. Baker again, because too much gaiety wasn't
good for her, and she was falling off in her studies. The other girls
said she had lost all her looks, for in truth she was wan and peaked
and hollow-eyed. Seventeen suffers frightfully, when it suffers at
all. Eighteen enjoys its blighted affection, revels in its broken
heart, would like to crochet a black edging on its immortal soul, and
wouldn't exchange its secret sorrow for a public joy. Nineteen is
convalescent--pride would come to its rescue even if life itself did
not beguile it into being happy.

Mary Virginia got back her color and her appetite and forgot to
remember that her heart was incurably broken and that she could never
love again. She liked to think her painful experience had made her
very wise. Then she went abroad, and her cure was complete. The result
of it all was that poise and pride which had so greatly delighted the
autocratic old kinswoman whose fiat had set the last seal of social
success upon her.

When one of life's little jokes flung Hunter into Appleboro and she
had to observe him with impartial and less ingenuous eyes, she forgave
the simple schoolgirl's natural mistake. He had not changed, and she
perceived his effect upon others older and wiser than herself. And her
pride chose neither to slight nor to ignore him now, but rather to
meet him casually, with indifference, as a stranger in whom she was
not at all interested.

Mr. Inglesby she did not take seriously. She did not dream that a
possible menace to herself lay in this stout man whom she considered
fatuous and absurd, when she thought of him at all. That her mother
should be completely taken in by his specious charity and his
plausible presentment of himself, did not surprise her. She was
inclined to smile scornfully and so dismiss him.

She underestimated Inglesby.

The very fact that there was such an obstacle in the way as a young
fellow with whom she fancied herself in love only deepened Inglesby's
passion for Mary Virginia. She was in her proper person all that he
coveted and grovel