honor.

When we were ready to go, Mrs. D----, to my surprise and
embarrassment, did not propose that our hostess should drive down-town
with us, although we were going directly back, and a cold "Scotch
mist" was beginning to fall. To this day, I do not know to what to
attribute what I then felt--what I still consider--was gross
incivility. The most charitable supposition is that it never occurred
to her that it would be neighborly and humane to offer a luxurious
seat in her swiftly rolling chariot to the woman who must otherwise
walk a mile in the chill and wet. She had the reputation of
absent-mindedness. Let us hope that her wits were off upon an
excursion when we got into the carriage and drove away, leaving Mrs.
C---- at the gate.

Glancing back, uneasily, I saw her raise an umbrella and set out upon
her cheerless promenade directly in our wake, and I made a desperate
essay at redressing the wrong.

"It is a pity Mrs. C---- must go out this afternoon," I said,
shiveringly. "She will have a damp walk."

"Yes," assented my companion, readily. "That is the worst of being in
this vicinity. There is no street railway within half a mile."

She went no further. I could go no further. The carriage was hers--not
mine.

Mrs. C---- 's brother did not call on me, nor did she ever again. The
latter circumstance might not have excited surprise, had she not
treated me with marked coldness when I met her casually at the house
of a friend. In the busy whirl of an active life, I should have
forgotten this circumstance, or set it down to my own imagination, had
not her brother's paper contained, a month or so later, an attack upon
myself that amazed me by what I thought was causeless acrimony. Even
when I found myself described as rich, haughty and heartless,
"consorting with people who could pay visits to me in coaches with
monograms upon the doors, and turning the cold shoulder to those who
came on foot,"--I did not associate the diatribe with my visit to the
writer's relative. Five years afterward, the truth was made known to
me by accident. Mrs. C---- had judged from something said during our
interview that the equipage belonged to me, and that I had brought
Mrs. D---- to see her instead of being the invited party. I was now a
resident of another city. The story came to me by a circuitous route.
Explanation was impracticable. Yet it is not six months since there
fell under my eye a paragraph penned by the offended brother