t fearing that she might some day find herself
unable to do without him. She needed him; he was at hand; and she
demanded fulfillment of her need. He brought her the consolation that
Ted could not bring her; he gave her aching heart peace. Repeatedly he
displayed a disposition to efface himself, after the first days of her
mourning were over, but she would not have it so. In her innocence she
still insisted on his frequent presence, and was sometimes puzzled and
hurt that he evinced so little gladness in being with her. That he had
the look of one harassed almost beyond endurance, she did finally
perceive, but she understood it not at all, and at last dismissed it
from her mind as something outside her province. Men had worries,
worries about money and trivial things like that, she reflected. Peter
was probably bothered about something of the sort, something that did
not greatly matter after all. A real trouble he would have brought to
her; of that she was sure.

So the winter passed in a close companionship between them, and it was
to Peter's honor that she knew neither her own heart nor his at the end
of it.

Ted it was, and not Peter, who made the situation impossible of
continuance. Ted it was who plucked from it, at least for Sheila, its
concealing innocence. He had been cordial to Peter; at first he had
even been grateful to him, seeing Sheila comforted by him. But after a
time he grew tired of Peter's face at his dinner table two or three
times a week; he wearied of finding Peter in his little sitting-room
whenever he came home particularly early; he sickened, with a sudden
and profound distaste, of having Peter drawn into all the intimate
concerns and happenings of his own and Sheila's life. Not for a moment
did he suspect Sheila of any sentimental inclinations toward Peter, for
he fully appreciated and trusted her fidelity. But he thought her
behavior foolish and imprudent, and in spite of his trust in her, he
_was_ jealous of this friendship which so absorbed and satisfied her.
Why should she require a man's friendship at all? Why should she
require anyone but himself and Eric? And having once questioned thus,
his patience speedily gave way, and a climax ensued.

"Sheila," he said to her one day, a day when he had come home to
discover Peter reading Maeterlinck to her, "Sheila, why on earth do you
have Burnett here so much?"

"Because he's my friend--my dear old friend," answered Sheila, her