r a moment's consideration, "why don't you take
a holiday? Some of the other ladies might look after her a while."

"Do you really think," she palpitated, "that I might? Do you think I
ought? I'm afraid I ought n't"--

"Not if your devotion is hurtful to her?" he asked. "Send some one else
to her for a while. Any one can take care of her for a few hours."

"I couldn't leave her--feeling as I do about her."

"I don't know how you feel about her," said Dr. Mulbridge. "But you
can't go on at this rate. I shall want your help by and by, and Mrs.
Maynard doesn't need you now. Don't go back to her."

"But if she should get worse while I am away"--

"You think your staying and feeling bad would make her better? Don't
go back," he repeated; and he went out to his ugly rawboned horse, and,
mounting his shabby wagon, rattled away. She lingered, indescribably
put to shame by the brutal common sense which she could not impeach, but
which she still felt was no measure of the case. It was true that she
had not told him everything, and she could not complain that he had
mocked her appeal for sympathy if she had trifled with him by a partial
confession. But she indignantly denied to herself that she had wished to
appeal to him for sympathy.

She wandered out on the piazza, which she found empty, and stood gazing
at the sea in a revery of passionate humiliation. She was in that mood,
familiar to us all, when we long to be consoled and even flattered for
having been silly. In a woman this mood is near to tears; at a touch of
kindness the tears come, and momentous questions are decided. What was
perhaps uppermost in the girl's heart was a detestation of the man to
whom she had seemed a simpleton; her thoughts pursued him, and divined
the contempt with which he must be thinking of her and her pretensions.
She heard steps on the sand, and Libby came round the corner of the
house from the stable.

VII.

Libby's friends had broken up their camp on the beach, and had gone to
a lake in the heart of the woods for the fishing. He had taken a room at
the Long Beach House, but he spent most of his time at Jocelyn's, where
he kept his mare for use in going upon errands for Mrs. Maynard. Grace
saw him constantly, and he was always doing little things for her with
a divination of her unexpressed desires which women find too rarely in
men. He brought her flowers, which, after refusing them for Mrs. Maynard
the first time, she accepted f