that the claim
might make complications.

Was it because she was plain? Curious that he had never attached
importance to that fact before! But it blinded him now to her graceful
carriage as well as to the way she had of holding her head with a noble,
independent poise that made her a woman of distinction.

She was smiling with an air at once intimate and triumphant. "I think
I've won in the first encounter, at any rate."

In his wincing there was the surprise of a man who in a moment of
expansion has made a sacred confidence only to find it crop up lightly
in subsequent conversation. He was obliged to employ some self-control
in order to say, with a manner sufficiently offhand, "What happened?"

She told of making her approaches under the plea of buying potted
plants. A cold reception had given way before her persistent
friendliness, while there had been complete capitulation on the tender
of an invitation to County Street to tea. The visit had been difficult
to manage, but amusing, and a little pitiful.

To the details that were difficult or pitiful he could listen with calm,
but he was inwardly indignant that Lois should find anything in her
meeting with Rosie that lent itself to humor. He knew that humor. The
superior were fond of indulging in it at the expense of the less
fortunate. Even Lois Willoughby had not escaped that taint of class.
Fearing to wound her by some impatient word, he made zeal in his round
of duties the excuse for an abrupt good-by.

But zeal in his round of duties changed to zeal of another kind as with
set face and long, swinging stride he hurried up the hill. The plans he
had been maturing for the psychological treatment of Mrs. Fay melted
into eagerness to know how the poor little thing had taken Lois's
advances. He was disappointed, therefore, that Rosie should receive him
coldly.

Within twenty-four hours his imagination had created between them
something with the flavor of a friendship. He had been thinking of her
so incessantly that it was disconcerting to perceive that apparently she
had not been thinking of him at all. He was the doctor to her, and no
more. She continued to direct Antonio, the Italian, who was opening a
crate of closely packed azalea-plants, while she discussed the effect of
his sedative on her mother. Her manner was dry and business-like; her
replies to his questions brief and to the point.

But professional duty being done, he endeavored to raise the persona