rold.

Maude was speaking to him now--Maude with her bright black eyes and
brilliant color. But she was neither crying nor strangling him with
kisses. She was shaking hands with him very decorously, and telling him
how pleased and glad she was. And in his hand he held her roses, which
he occasionally smelled as he listened, and smiled upon her with that
peculiar smile of his which made him so attractive. But the lilies were
nowhere to be seen; and when, an hour later, all the baskets and
bouquets bearing his name were piled together, the lilies were not
there.

'He has thrown them away! He did not care for them at all, and I might
as well have staid in bed as to have gotten up at four o'clock and
risked my neck to get them. He likes Maude and her roses better than he
does me,' Jerrie thought, with a swelling heart and all through the
journey home--for they returned that night--she was very quiet and
tactiturn, letting Maude do all the talking, and saying when asked why
she was so still, that her head was aching, and that she was too tired
and sleepy to talk.

That was the last time for years that Jerrie put her arms around
Harold's neck, or touched her lips to his; for it had come to her like a
blow how much he was to her, and, as she believed, how little she was to
him.

'Maude is preferred to me--I see it now so plainly; he likes me well
enough, but he loves _her_--I saw it in the way he looked at her that
time I mortified him so dreadfully with my _gush_,' she thought; and
although of all her girl friends, not even excepting Nina St. Claire,
Maude was the nearest and dearest, she was half-glad when a week or two
later, Maude said good-bye to her, and with her mother sailed away to
Europe, where she remained for more than a year and a half.

During her absence the two girls corresponded regularly, and Jerrie
never failed to write whatever she thought would please her friend to
hear of Harold; and when at last Maude returned, and wrote to Jerrie of
failing health, and wakeful nights, and lonely days, and her longing for
the time when Jerrie would be home, and be with her, and read to her, or
recite bits of poetry, as she had been wont to do, Jerrie trampled every
jealous, selfish thought under her feet, and in her letters to Harold
urged him to see Maude as often as possible, and read to her whenever
she wished him to do so.

'You have such a splendid voice, and read so well,' she wrote, 'that it
will rest her