n of what
would be more telling, or she would have insisted upon his delaying
any sort of reply, and he could not endure the thought of difference or
delay.

He asked himself whether he should let her see the rough first draft of
his letter or not, and he decided that he would not. But when she came
into his study on her return he showed it her.

She read it in silence, and then she seemed to temporize in asking,
"Where are her two letters?"

"I've sent them back with the answer."

His mother let the paper drop from her hands. "Philip! You haven't sent
this!"

"Yes, I have. It wasn't what I wanted to make it, but I wished to get
the detestable experience out of my mind, and it was the best I could do
at the moment. Don't you like it?"

"Oh--" She seemed beginning to say something, but without saying
anything she took the fallen leaf up and read it again.

"Well!" he demanded, with impatience.

"Oh, you may have been right. I hope you've not been wrong."

"Mother!"

"She deserved the severest things you could say; and yet--"

"Well?"

"Perhaps she was punished enough already."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't like your being-vindictive."

"Vindictive?"

"Being so terribly just, then." She added, at his blank stare, "This is
killing, Philip."

He gave a bitter laugh. "I don't think it will kill her. She isn't that
kind."

"She's a girl," his mother said, with a kind of sad absence.

"But not a single-minded girl, you warned me. I wish I could have taken
your warning. It would have saved me from playing the fool before myself
and giving myself away to Armiger, and letting him give himself away. I
don't think Miss Brown will suffer much before she dies. She will 'get
together,' as she calls it, with that other girl and have 'a real good
time' over it. You know the village type and the village conditions,
where the vulgar ignorance of any larger world is so thick you could cut
it with a knife. Don't be troubled by my vindictiveness or my justice,
mother! I begin to think I have done justice and not fallen short of it,
as I was afraid."

Mrs. Verrian sighed, and again she gave his letter back to her son.
"Perhaps you are right, Philip. She is probably so tough as not to feel
it very painfully."

"She's not so tough but she'll be very glad to get out of it so lightly.
She has had a useful scare, and I've done her a favor in making the
scare a sharp one. I suppose," Verrian mused, "that she thinks I'