hat in the interval since she
had seen him he had seen the woman who was to take him from her. She was
always preparing herself for that, knowing that it must come almost as
certainly as death, and knowing that with all her preparation she should
not be ready for it. "I've got rather a long story to tell you and
rather a strange story," he said, lifting his head and looking round,
but not so impersonally that his mother did not know well enough to say
to the Swedish serving-woman:

"You needn't stay, Margit. I'll give Mr. Philip his breakfast. Well!"
she added, when they were alone.

"Well," he returned, with a smile that she knew he was forcing, "I have
seen the girl that wrote that letter."

"Not Jerusha Brown?"

"Not Jerusha Brown, but the girl all the same."

"Now go on, Philip, and don't miss a single word!" she commanded
him, with an imperious breathlessness. "You know I won't hurry you or
interrupt you, but you must--you really must-tell me everything. Don't
leave out the slightest detail."

"I won't," he said. But she was aware, from time to time, that she
was keeping her word better than he was keeping his, in his account of
meeting Miss Shirley and all the following events.

"You can imagine," he said, "what a sensation the swooning made, and the
commotion that followed it."

"Yes, I can imagine that," she answered. But she was yet so faithful
that she would not ask him to go on.

He continued, unasked, "I don't know just how, now, to account for
its coming into my head that it was Miss Andrews who was my unknown
correspondent. I suppose I've always unconsciously expected to meet
that girl, and Miss Andrews's hypothetical case was psychologically so
parallel--"

"Yes, yes!"

"And I've sometimes been afraid that I judged it too harshly--that it
was a mere girlish freak without any sort of serious import."

"I was sometimes afraid so, Philip. But--"

"And I don't believe now that the hypothetical case brought any
intolerable stress of conscience upon Miss Shirley, or that she fainted
from any cause but exhaustion from the general ordeal. She was still
weak from the sickness she had been through--too weak to bear the strain
of the work she had taken up. Of course, the catastrophe gave the whole
surface situation away, and I must say that those rather banal young
people behaved very humanely about it. There was nothing but interest
of the nicest kind, and, if she is going on with her career, it wi