id he with a sad,
patient, steady face and voice, "I have decided that I ought to give her
up. It was my intention to have everything settled before I went to
college, but this afternoon I made her tell me the truth about your
accident: since then I feel that you have the first claim upon her."

"I don't know what you mean."

He smiled and shook his head. "You have lost a great deal," he returned
with unwonted tenderness: "you need much happiness, much private,
individual contentment, to enable you to bear the troubles that have
come upon you. Georgy was in a measure concerned in causing them: she
ought to make full atonement for all the harm she has done. Ever since
you came back I have felt that if I could do you any good I would cut
off my right hand to serve you. At last I see a way. If you wish it,
Floyd, the dearest wish of your heart may come to pass."

"The--dearest--wish--of--my--heart?" I stuttered. "I don't know what you
mean."

He laughed quietly. "I suspect you know all about it," he said. "You are
a quiet fellow, but I am not so blind as not to have found out that you
are in love with Georgy. But in spite of that, I used to feel, although
you are handsomer than I, and a thousand times cleverer, that I had the
first claim upon her. You are younger than she is; she will be a grown
woman while you are still a boy: in fact, there were plenty of reasons
why I never hesitated to come before you. But now I feel bound in honor
to tell you that I give her up--that--that you can--"

He paused and looked at me, believing he had said enough, but I was
stupefied by my ignorance, shyness and doubt. "Do you mean," I blurted
out, "that you will give up marrying her--that I can have her in your
place?"

"That is precisely what I mean."

"You will do nothing of the sort," I cried roughly. "Even if she cared
for me--which she does not--nothing could induce me to marry anybody,
and least of all Georgy Lenox."

For she had wounded my pride and vanity to the quick, and even the kiss
she had given me seemed a very Judas kiss of falsehood and betrayal.

CHAPTER VIII.

As soon as the warm weather came we went to the mountains, and when we
returned in the autumn I had put aside one crutch, and felt at times
that I was soon to banish the other. The boys had gone to college, and
Belfield was desolate to me. Georgy was visiting cousins in New York. I
had not seen her since that evening in June when she came to see me, no