it, Mollie?"

"Nothing has made me angry," she replied. "I am not angry."

"But you look angry," he returned, "and how do you suppose I am to be
interesting when you look angry?"

"It cannot matter to you," said Miss Mollie, "whether I am angry or
not."

"Not matter!" he echoed, with great gravity. "It amounts to positive
cruelty. Just at this particular moment I feel as if I should never
smile again."

She reddened to her very throat, and then turned round all at once,
flashing upon him such a piteous, indignant, indescribable glance as
almost startled him.

"You are making fun of me," she cried out. "You always make fun of _me_.
You would n't talk so to Dolly." And that instant she burst into tears.

He was dumbfounded. He could not comprehend it at all. He had thought
of her as being so completely a child, that her troubles were never more
than a child's troubles, and her moods a child's moods. He had admired
her, too, as he would have admired her if she had been six years old,
and he had never spoken to her as he would have spoken to a woman, in
the whole course of their acquaintance. She was right in telling him
that he would not have said such things to Dolly. He was both concerned
and touched. What could he do but go to her and be dangerously penitent,
and say a great many things easily said, but not soon to be forgotten!
Indeed, her soft, nervous, passionate sobs, of which she was so much
ashamed, her innocent tremor, and her pretty, wilful disregard of his
remorse were such a new sensation to him, that it must be confessed he
was not so discreet as he should have been.

"You never speak so to Dolly," she persisted, "nor to Aimee, either,
and Aimee is only two years older than I am. It is not my fault,"
petulantly, "that I am only seventeen."

"Fault!" he repeated after her. "It is a very charming fault, if it is
one. Come, Mollie," looking down at her with a tender softness in his
eyes, "make friends with me again,--we ought to be friends. See,--let us
shake hands!"

Of course she let him take her hand and hold it lightly for a moment as
he talked, his really honest remorse at his blunder making him doubly
earnest and so doubly dangerous. She had swept even Dolly out of his
mind for the time being, and she occupied his attention so fully for the
rest of the evening that he had not the time to be absent-minded again.
In half an hour all traces of her tears had fled, and she was sitting on
her foots