rful
face to his. "I am very fond of you, Olaf dear. Oh, don't think I am not
fond of you." And the girl paused for a breathless moment. "I think I
might have married you, Olaf," she said, half-wistfully, "if--if it
hadn't been for one thing."

Rudolph Musgrave smiled now, though he found it a difficult business.
"Yes," he assented, gravely, "I know, dear. If it were not for the other
man--that lucky devil! Yes, he is a very, very lucky devil, child, and
he constitutes rather a big 'if,' doesn't he?"

Miss Stapylton, too, smiled a little. "No," said she, "that isn't quite
the reason. The real reason is, as I told you yesterday, that I quite
fail to see how you can expect any woman to marry you, you jay-bird, if
you won't go to the trouble of asking her to do so."

And, this time, Miss Stapylton did not go into the house.

VII

When they went in to supper, they had planned to tell Miss Agatha of
their earth-staggering secret at once. But the colonel comprehended, at
the first glimpse of his sister, that the opportunity would be
ill-chosen.

The meal was an awkward half-hour. Miss Agatha, from the head of the
table, did very little talking, save occasionally to evince views of
life that were both lachrymose and pugnacious. And the lovers talked
with desperate cheerfulness, so that there might be no outbreak so long
as Pilkins--preeminently ceremonious among butlers, and as yet inclined
to scoff at the notion that the Musgraves of Matocton were not divinely
entrusted to his guardianship,--was in the room.

Coming so close upon the heels of his high hour, this contretemps of
Agatha's having one of her "attacks," seemed more to Rudolph Musgrave
than a man need rationally bear with equanimity. Perhaps it was a trifle
stiffly that he said he did not care for any raspberries.

His sister burst into tears.

"That's all the thanks I get. I slave my life out, and what thanks do I
get for it? I never have any pleasure, I never put my foot out of the
house except to go to market,--and what thanks do I get for it? That's
what I want you to tell me with the first raspberries of the season.
That's what I want! Oh, I don't wonder you can't look me in the eye. And
I wish I was dead! that's what I wish!"

Colonel Musgrave did not turn at once toward Patricia, when his sister
had stumbled, weeping, from the dining-room.

"I--I am so sorry, Olaf," said a remote and tiny voice.

Then he touched her hand with his finger