see him if he
should be in town that day. There was only one--the library.
Often, when there, she had seen him pass in and out. He had no
need to come for books or periodicals, all these he could have at
home; but she had heard the librarian and him at work; over the
files of old papers containing accounts of early agricultural
affairs and the first cattle-shows of the state. She resolved to
go to the library: what desire had she ever known that she had not
gratified?

When Marguerite, about eleven o'clock, approached the library a
little fearfully, she saw Barbee pacing to and fro on the sidewalk
before the steps. She felt inclined to turn back; he was the last
person she cared to meet this morning. Play with him had suddenly
ended as a picnic in a spring grove is interrupted by a tempest.

"I ought to tell him at once," she said; and she went forward.

He came to meet her--with a countenance dissatisfied and
reproachful. It struck her that his thin large ears looked
yellowish instead of red and that his freckles had apparently
spread and thickened. She asked herself why she had never before
realized how boyish he was.

"Marguerite," he said at once, as though the matter were to be
taken firmly in hand, "you treated me shabbily the night of your
party. It was unworthy of you. And I will not stand it. You
ought not be such a child!"

Her breath was taken away. She blanched and her eyes dilated as
she looked at him: the lash of words had never been laid on her.

"Are you calling me to account?" she asked. "Then I shall call you
to an account. When you came up to speak to grandmother and to
mamma and me, you spoke to us as though you were an indifferent
suitor of mine--as though I were a suitor of yours. As soon as you
were gone, mamma said to me: 'What have you been doing, Marguerite,
that he should think you are in love with him--that he should treat
us as though we all wished to catch him?'"

"That was a mistake of your mother's. But after what had passed
between us--"

"No matter what had passed between us, I do not think that a _man_
would virtually tell a girl's mother on her: a boy might."

He grew ashen; and he took his hand out of his pockets and
straightened himself from his slouchy lounging posture, and stood
before her, his head in the air on his long neck like a young stag
affronted and enraged.

"It is true, I have sometimes been too much like a boy with you,"
he said. "Have yo