rfs humanity to me. But I have some business to
take up my mind. I was sadly discontented until this opening came."

"I wish you had kept that money in your own hands," she said
confidentially, "and used it to buy an interest in a paper. When I read
your description of the reception this morning, it seemed to me that was
your forte."

"Thanks for your compliment," he answered, "and I only wish you edited
the paper now. But if you did, my pencil-pushing wouldn't strike you
that way."

"But it really did," she continued, "and the best of it was what you
didn't say, knowing, as I do, how you regard such affairs. Hiding your
own opinion so well was fine art."

"I wasn't expected to express my views," he asserted, "but to flatter
you all judiciously; that's what makes a paper popular."

"And do you think I wanted to be flattered?" she asked.

"Certainly," he replied, "you are a woman."

Ethel laughed.

"Personally, you are wrong; in general, right. I receive so much of it,
it wearies me, knowing as I do how insincere it all is, but most of my
sex, I'll admit, feel otherwise. But tell me why you haven't called for
three weeks?"

It was a question he could not answer truthfully, and like all the
polite world he evaded it.

"My work is my excuse," he said; "and then I've not been in a mood for
sociability."

Ethel looked at him long and earnestly, reading him, as she read most
men, like an open book.

"Winn, my dear old friend," she said at last, in the open-your-heart
tone so natural to her, "I made you a promise long ago and I shall keep
it, so forgive my question. But you needn't fear me. I want to be your
friend and feel you are mine, in spite of the old score and this new
influence. And when you are ready to trust me, no one in the world shall
be more worthy of it."

Then they drifted to commonplaces: she, as all women will, relating the
gossip of her set and chatting of the latest opera, what was on at the
theatres and the like. Now and then she let fall a word of quiet
flattery, or what was more potent, one by inference; for Ethel Sherman
was past-mistress in that art. And all the while she looked at Winn,
smiling deference to his opinions and pointing hers about others with a
keen wit so natural to her.

She played and sang, selecting as once before (and unfortunately,
perhaps) the songs that carried his thoughts to Rockhaven.

So charming was she in all this, when she chose, that the evening sped
b