street toward his office.

Marguerite did not send a glance after him. What can make us so
cruel to those who vainly love us as our vain love of some one
else? What do we care for their suffering? We see it in their
faces, hear it in their speech, feel it as the tragedy of their
lives. But we turn away from them unmoved and cry out at the
heartlessness of those whom our own faces and words and sorrow do
not touch.

She lowered her parasol, and pressing her palm against one cheek
and then the other, to force back the betraying blood, hurried
agitated and elated into the library. A new kind of excitement
filled her: she had confessed her secret, had proved her fidelity
to him she loved by turning off the playmate of childhood. Who
does not know the relief of confessing to some one who does not
understand?

The interior of the library was an immense rectangular room. Book
shelves projected from each side toward the middle, forming
alcoves. Seated in one of these alcoves, you could be seen only by
persons who should chance to pass. The library was never crowded
and it was nearly empty now. Marguerite lingered to speak with the
librarian, meantime looking carefully around the room; and then
moved on toward the shelves where she remembered having once seen a
certain book of which she was now thinking. It had not interested
her then; she had heard it spoken of since, but it had not
interested her since. Only to-day something new within herself
drew her toward it.

No one was in the alcove she entered. After a while she found her
book and seated herself in a nook of the walls with her face turned
in the one direction from which she could be discovered by any one
passing. While she read, she wished to watch: might he not pass?

It was a very old volume, thumbed by generations of readers. Pages
were gone, the halves of pages worn away or tattered. It was
printed in an old style of uncertain spelling so that the period of
its authorship could in this way be but doubtfully indicated.
Ostensibly it came down from the ruder, plainer speech of old
English times, which may have found leisure for such "A Booke of
Folly."

Marguerite's eyes settled first on the complete title: "Lady
Bluefields' First Principles of Courting for Ye Use of Ye Ladies;
but Plainly Set Down for Ye Good of Ye Beginners."

"I am not a beginner," thought Marguerite, who had been in love
three days; and she began to read:

"_Now of a