ted on
it. Miss Anderson went and softly closed the door opening into the next
room.

"I was afraid our talking might disturb my aunt," she said, and on her
way back to him she picked up the photograph case and brought it to the
light. "These are my father and mother. We live at Yonkers; but I'm with
my aunt a good deal of the time in town--even when I'm at home." She
laughed at her own contradictory statement, and put the case back
without explaining the third figure--a figure in uniform. Dan
conjectured a military brother, or from her indifference perhaps a
militia brother, and then forgot about him. But the partial Yonkers
residence accounted for traits of unconventionality in Miss Anderson
which he had not been able to reconcile with the notion of an
exclusively New York breeding. He felt the relief, the sympathy, the
certainty of intelligence which every person whose life has been partly
spent in the country feels at finding that a suspected cockney has also
had the outlook into nature and simplicity.

On the Yonkers basis they became more intimate, more personal, and Dan
told her about Ponkwasset Falls and his mother and sisters; he told her
about his father, and she said she should like to see his father; she
thought he must be like her father.

All at once, and for no reason that he could think of afterward, except,
perhaps, the desire to see the case with her eyes, he began to tell her
of his affair with Alice, and how and why it was broken off; he told the
whole truth in regard to that, and did not spare himself.

She listened without once speaking, but without apparent surprise at the
confidence, though she may have felt surprised. At times she looked as
if her thoughts were away from what he was saying.

He ended with, "I'm sure I don't know why I've told you all this. But I
wanted you to know about me. The worst."

Miss Anderson said, looking down, "I always thought she was a very
conscientious giyl." Then after a pause, in which she seemed to be
overcoming an embarrassment in being obliged to speak of another in such
a conviction, "I think she was very moybid. She was like ever so many
New England giyls that I've met. They seem to want some excuse for
suffering; and they must suffer even if it's through somebody else. I
don't know; they're romantic, New England giyls are; they have too many
ideals."

Dan felt a balm in this; he too had noticed a superfluity of ideals
in Alice, he had borne the bur