ts
effect.

"Say?" exclaimed the girl indignantly. "He tried to make me say."

"I see," said Mrs. Pasmer. "Well?"

"But I forced him to speak, and then--I rejected him. That's all."

"Poor fellow!" said Mrs. Pasmer. "He was afraid of you."

"And that's what made it the more odious. Do you think I wished him to
be afraid of me? Would that be any pleasure? I should hate myself if I
had to quell anybody into being unlike themselves." She sat down for a
moment, and then jumped up again, and went to the window, for no reason,
and came back.

"Yes," said her mother impartially, "he's light, and he's roundabout. He
couldn't come straight at anything."

"And would you have me accept such a--being?"

Mrs. Pasmer smiled a little at the literary word, and continued: "But
he's very sweet, and he's as good as the day's long, and he's very fond
of you, and--I thought you liked him."

The girl threw up her arms across her eyes. "Oh, how can you say such a
thing, mamma?"

She dropped into a chair at the bedside, and let her face fall into her
hands, and cried.

Her mother waited for the gust of tears to pass before she said, "But if
you feel so about it--"

"Mamma!" Alice sprang to her feet.

"It needn't come from you. I could make some excuse to see him--write
him a little note--"

"Never!" exclaimed Alice grandly. "What I've done I've done from my
reason, and my feelings have nothing to do with it."

"Oh, very well," said her mother, going out of the room, not wholly
disappointed with what she viewed as a respite, and amused by her
daughter's tragics. "But if you think that the feelings have nothing to
do with such a matter, you're very much mistaken." If she believed that
her daughter did not know her real motives in rejecting Dan Mavering, or
had not been able to give them, she did not say so.

The little group of Aliceolaters on the piazza, who began to canvass the
causes of Mavering's going before the top of his hat disappeared below
the bank on the path leading to the ferry-boat, were of two minds. One
faction held that he was going because Alice had refused him, and that
his gaiety up to the last moment was only a mask to hide his despair.
The other side contended that, if he and Alice were not actually
engaged, they understood each other, and he was going away because he
wanted to tell his family, or something of that kind. Between the two
opinions Miss Cotton wavered with a sentimental attraction to eithe