g down so that one brown tress hung swaying before Tod's
eyes. "Has she, Griffith?"

"Yes," answered Griffith, looking at her with a vague sense of
admiration. He shared all Dolly's enthusiasm on the subject of Mollie's
prettiness.

"Was n't it good? I wish I was as cool as Dolly is. And poor Phemie--and
the gentleman who made love to you all the evening, Dolly. What was his
name? Was n't it Gowan?"

Griffith's eyes turned toward Dolly that instant.

"Gowan!" he exclaimed. "You didn't say anything about him. You didn't
even say he was there."

"Did n't she?" said Mollie, looking up with innocently wide-open eyes.
"Why, he made love to her all--"

"I wish you would n't talk such rubbish, Mollie," Dolly interrupted
her--a trifle sharply because she understood the cloud on her lover's
face so well. "Who said Mr. Gowan made love to me? Not I, you may be
sure. I told you he talked to me, and that was all."

"You did not tell _me_ that much," said Griffith, dryly.

It would scarcely have been human nature for Dolly not to have fired a
little then, in spite of herself. She was constitutionally good-natured,
but she was not seraphic, and her lover's rather excusable jealousy
was specially hard to bear, when, as upon this occasion, it had no real
foundation.

"I did not think it necessary," she said; "and, besides, I forgot;
but if you wish to know the particulars," with a stiff little air
of dignity, "I can give them you. Mr. Gowan was there, and found the
evening stupid, as every one else did. There was no one else to talk to,
so he talked to me, and when I came home he put me into the cab. And,
the fact is, he is a good-natured Philistine enough. That is all, I
believe, unless you would like me to try to record all he said."

"No, thank you," answered Griffith, and instantly began to torture
himself with imagining what he really had said, making the very natural
mistake of imagining what he would have said himself, and then giving
Ralph Gowan credit for having perpetrated like tender gallantries. He
never could divest himself of the idea that every living man found
Dolly as entrancing as he found her himself. It could only be one man's
bitter-sweet portion to be as desperately and inconsolably in love with
her as he was himself, and no other than himself, or a man who might be
his exact prototype, could have cherished a love at once so strong and
so weak. There had been other men who had loved Dolly Crewe,---adore