hing--very highly--of you, and might have answered you very
differently before, when you were free to tell me _that_--now
I have nothing but the utmost abhorrence--and--disapproval of you.
And--and-- Oh, I don't see how you can be so hateful!" She hides her
face in her hands and rushes from the room, overturning several chairs
in her course toward the door. Ashley remains staring after her, while
a succession of impetuous rings make themselves heard from the street
door. There is a sound of opening it, and then a flutter of skirts and
anxieties, and Miss Garnett comes running into the room.

VI

MISS GARNETT, MR. ASHLEY

_Miss Garnett_, to the maid hovering in the doorway: "Yes, I must have
left it here, for I never missed it till I went to pay my fare in the
motor-bus, and tried to think whether I had the exact dime, and if I
hadn't whether the conductor would change a five-dollar bill or not,
and then it rushed into my mind that I had left my purse somewhere,
and I knew I hadn't been anywhere else." She runs from the mantel to
the writing-desk in the corner, and then to the sofa, where, peering
under the tea-table, she finds her purse on the shelf. "Oh, here it
is, Nora, just where I put it when we began to talk, and I must have
gone out and left it. I--" She starts with a little shriek, in
encountering Ashley. "Oh, Mr. Ashley! What a fright you gave me! I was
just looking for my purse that I missed when I went to pay my fare in
the motor-bus, and was wondering whether I had the exact dime, or the
conductor could change a five-dollar bill, and--" She discovers, or
affects to discover, something strange in his manner. "What--what is
the matter, Mr. Ashley?"

_Ashley_: "I shall be glad to have you tell me--or any one."

_Miss Garnett_: "I don't understand. Has Isobel--"

_Ashley_: "Miss Garnett, did you know I was engaged?"

_Miss Garnett_: "Why, yes; I was just going to congrat--"

_Ashley_: "Well, don't, unless you can tell me whom I am engaged to."

_Miss Garnett_: "Why, aren't you engaged to Emily Fray?"

_Ashley_: "Not the least in the world."

_Miss Garnett_, in despair: "Then _what_ have I done? Oh, what a
fatal, fatal scrape!" With a ray of returning hope: "But she told me
_herself_ that she was engaged! And you were together so much, last
summer!" Desperately: "Then if she isn't engaged to you, whom is she
engaged to?"

_Ashley_: "On gener