everent solemnity; but though it did not tremble, its touch was
cold as marble, and conveyed to Averil an instant sense of the force of
his repressed emotion. She started under it, and exclaimed with the
first agitation she had shown, 'No, no; it would cost you too much.
You, young, beginning life--you must not take a sorrow upon you.'

'Is it not there already?' he said, almost inaudibly. 'Would it lessen
it to be kept away from you?'

'Oh, do not go on, do not tempt me,' she cried. 'Think of your father.'

'Nay, think what he is yourself. Or rather look here,' and he took out
a part of a letter from Ethel, and laid it before her.

'As to papa not guessing your object,' she said, 'that was a vain
delusion if you ever entertained it, so you must not mind my having
explained. He said if he had been you, it was just what he should have
done himself, and he is quite ready to throw his heart into it if you
will only trust to his kindness. I do so want you really to try what
that is.'

'And you came for this,' faltered Averil, leaning back, almost overcome.

'I did not come meaning to hurry the subject on you. I hoped to have
induced Henry to have brought you all home, and then, when I had done
my best to efface the recollection of that unpardonable behaviour, to
have tried whether you could look on me differently.'

'I don't like you to say that,' said Averil, simply but earnestly; 'I
have felt over and over again how wrong I was--how ungrateful--to have
utterly missed all the nobleness and generosity of your behaviour, and
answered in that unjust, ill-tempered way.'

'Nothing was ever more deserved,' he answered; 'I have hated myself
ever since, and I hope I am not as obnoxious now.'

'It was I!' she said; 'I have lived every bit of the winter over again,
and seen that I was always ready to be offended, and somehow I could
not help caring so much for what you said, that lesser things from you
hurt and cut as other people's did not.'

'Do you know what that proves?' said Tom, with an arch subsmile
lighting on his eyes and mouth; and as a glow awoke on her pale cheek,
he added, 'and won't you believe, too, that my propensity to
"contemptuous irony" was all from my instinctive fear of what you could
do to me!'

'Oh, don't repeat that! I have been so bitterly ashamed of it!'

'I am sure I have.'

'And I have longed so to ask your pardon. I thought I would leave a
letter or message with Ella that you wou