, or with people who are too poor to marry us, or--"

"Speak for yourself," said Mollie, with a vigor quite wonderful and new
in her. "_I_ am not."

And she held her screen up between her face and his, so that he could
not see her. She could have burst into a passionate gush of tears. It
was Dolly he was thinking about,--it was Dolly who had the power to make
him unhappy and sardonic,--always Dolly.

"Then you are a wise child, Mollie," he said. "But you are a very young
child yet,--only seventeen, is n't it? Well, it may all come in good
time."

"It will not come at all," she asserted, stubbornly.

Dolly's little wretch of a hand-screen was quite trembling in her hand,
it made her so desperate to feel, as she did, that she was of such small
consequence to him that he could treat her as a child, and make a sort
of joke of his confidence. But he did not see it.

"Ah! well, you see," he went on, "I thought so once, but it has come to
me nevertheless. The fact is, I am crying for the moon, Mollie, as many
a wiser and better man has done before me."

She did not answer, so he rose and walked once or twice across the room.
When he came back to the fire, she had risen too, and was standing up,
biting the edge of her screen, all flushed, and with a brightness in
her eyes he did not understand. Poor little soul! she was suffering very
sharply in her childish way.

He laid a hand on either of her shoulders, and spoke to her gently
enough.

"Mollie," he said, "let us sit down together and condole with each
other. You are not in a good humor to-night, something has rasped
you again; and as for me, I am about as miserable, my dear, as it is
possible for a man with a few thousand a year to be."

She tried to answer him steadily, and, finding she could not, rushed
into novel subterfuge. Subterfuge was a novelty to Mollie.

"Yes," she said, lifting the most beauteous of tear-wet eyes to his
quite eagerly. "Yes, I am crossed, and--and something has vexed me. I am
getting bad-tempered, I think. Suppose we do sit down."

And then when they did sit down--she on the hearth-rug at his feet, he
in Dolly's chair again--she broke out upon him in a voice like a sharp
little sob.

"I know what _you_ are miserable about," she said. "You are miserable
about Dolly."

They had never spoken about the matter openly before, though he had
always felt that if he could speak openly to any one, he could to this
charming charge of his. Suc