rself a pair of grass-green gloves. From that time forward she
always openly declared that she despised Mr. Thorne.

That evening, when they came back from their walk, Lisle asked his
companion to lend him a couple of sovereigns. "You shall have them
back to-morrow," he said airily. Percival assented as a matter of
course. He hardly thought about it at all, and if he had he would have
supposed that there was something to be paid in Miss Lisle's absence.
He had still something left of the small fortune with which he
had started. It was very little, but he could manage Bertie's two
sovereigns with that and the money he had laid aside for Mrs. Bryant's
weekly bill.

Percival Thorne, always exact in his accounts, supposed that a time
was fixed for the repayment of the loan. He did not understand that
his debtor was one of those people who when they say "I will pay you
to-morrow," merely mean "I will not pay you to-day."

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

CONCERNING SISSY.

Percival had announced the fact of the Lisles' presence in Bellevue
street to Sissy in a carefully careless sentence. Sissy read it, and
shivered sadly. Then she answered in a peculiarly bright and cheerful
letter. "I'm not fit for him," she thought as she wrote it. "I don't
understand him, and I'm always afraid. Even when he loved me best I
felt as if he loved some dream-girl and took me for her in his dream,
and would be angry with me when he woke. Miss Lisle would not be
afraid. It is the least I can do for Percival, not to stand in the way
of his happiness--the least I can do, and oh, how much the hardest!"
So she gave Thorne to understand that she was getting on remarkably
well.

It was not altogether false. She had fallen from a dizzy height, but
she had found something of rest and security in the valley below. And
as prisoners cut off from all the larger interests of their lives pet
the plants and creatures which chance to lighten their captivity, so
did Sissy begin to take pleasure in little gayeties for which she
had not cared in old days. She could sleep now at night without
apprehension, and she woke refreshed. There was a great blank in her
existence where the thunderbolt fell, but the cloud which hung so
blackly overhead was gone. The lonely life was sad, but it held
nothing quite so dreadful as the fear that a day might come when
Percival and his wife would know that they stood on different
levels--that she could not see with his eyes nor unders