se him--here--this instant, so that contrition might try
its value! But under the shade of her hat her eyes merely waited with a
beautiful sort of patient urgency for his parting word. The moment's
silence seemed an hour, but no word did he find. One after another
almost came, but failed, and at last, just as he took in his breath to
say he knew not what--anything so it were something--he saw her smile
melt with sudden kindness, while her lips parted for speech, and to his
immeasurable confusion and terror heard himself ask her with cheerful
cordiality, "Won't you walk in?"

It would have been hard to tell which of the two turned the redder.

"Why, Mr. March, you in-ti-ma-ted that you had no ti-i-ime!"

They stood still. "Time and bad news are about the only things I have
got, Miss Barb. Wrapped up in your father's interests as you are, I
reckon I ought to show you this." He handed her the telegram doubled
small. "Let me hold your book."

Barbara unfolded and read the despatch. It was from Springfield,
repeated at New York, and notified Mr. John March that owing to a
failure of Gamble to come to terms with certain much larger railroad
owners for the reception of his road into their "system," intelligence
of which had just reached them, it would be "useless for him," March,
"to come up," as there was "nothing more to say or hear." She read it
twice. Her notions of its consequences were dim, but she saw it was a
door politely closed in his face; and yet she lingered over it. There
was a bliss in these business confidences, which each one thought was
her or his own exclusive and unsuspected theft, and which was all the
sweeter for the confidences' practical worthlessness. As she looked up
she uttered a troubled "O!" to find him smiling unconsciously into her
book where she had written, "I stole this book from Barbara Garnet." It
seemed as if fate were always showing her very worst sides to him at the
very worst times! She took the volume with hurried thanks and returned
the telegram.

"It would have been better on every account if you hadn't come up at
all, wouldn't it?" she asked, bent on self-cruelty; but he accepted the
cruelty as meant for him.

"Yes," he meekly replied. "I--I reckon it would." Then more bravely:
"I've got to give up here and try the West. Your father's advised it
strongly these last three weeks."

"Has he?" she pensively asked. Here was a new vexation. Obviously March,
in writing him, had ment