ith her, an heiress, the pet of society; he a man who had given
up his life for a whim, a fad, a fanatical fancy! But she knew it was
not so. She knew him to be a man of all men. She knew it was true that
she was not such a woman as a man like that could fitly wed, and the
thought galled her constantly.

She tried to accustom herself to think of him as a pleasant experience,
a friend who might have been if circumstances with them both had been
different; she tried to tell herself that it was a passing fancy with
them which both would forget; and she tried with all her heart to
forget, even locking away the precious little book and trying to forget
it too.

And then, one day in late summer, she went with a motoring party through
New England; as frolicsome and giddy a party as could be found among New
York society transferred for the summer to the world of Nature. There
was to be a dance or a house party or something of the sort at the end
of the drive. Hazel scarcely knew, and cared less. She was becoming
utterly weary of her butterfly life.

The day was hot and dusty, Indian summer intensified. They had got out
of their way through a mistake of the chauffeur, and suddenly just on
the edge of a tiny quaint little village the car broke down and refused
to go on without a lengthy siege of coaxing and petting.

The members of the party, powdered with dust and in no very pleasant
frame of mind from the delay, took refuge at the village inn, an
old-time hostelry close to the roadside, with wide, brick-paved,
white-pillared piazza across the front, and a mysterious hedged garden
at the side. There were many plain wooden rockers neatly adorned with
white crash on the piazza, and one or two late summer boarders loitering
about with knitting work or book. The landlord brought cool tinkling
glasses of water and rich milk from the spring-house, and they dropped
into the chairs to wait while the men of the party gave assistance to
the chauffeur in patching up the car.

Hazel sank wearily into her chair and sipped the milk unhungrily. She
wished she had not come; wished the day were over, and that she might
have planned something more interesting; wished she had chosen different
people to be of her party; and idly watched a white hen with yellow kid
boots and a coral comb in her nicely groomed hair picking daintily about
the green under the oak trees that shaded the street. She listened to
the drone of the bees in the garden nea