eeting. I thought
that very interesting."

"Very sensible, too. They are mostly childless mothers, and a sprinkling
of motherless children will add zest to the assemblage."

They both laughed, and the young man's laugh ended in a cough. The girl
glanced uneasily toward the bank of fog that was sweeping across the
valley.

"Mr. Palmerston," she said, "the fog is driving in very fast, and it is
growing quite damp and chilly. I think you ought to go home. Wait a
minute," she added, hurrying into the tent and returning with a soft
gray shawl. "I am afraid you will be cold; let me put this about your
shoulders."

She threw it around him and pinned it under his chin, standing in front
of him with her forehead on a level with his lips.

"Now hurry!"

A man does not submit to the humiliation of having a shawl pinned about
his shoulders without questioning his own sanity, and some consciousness
of this fact forced itself upon Palmerston as he made his way along the
narrow path through the greasewood. He had removed the obnoxious
drapery, of course, and was vindicating his masculinity by becoming very
cold and damp in the clammy folds of the fog which had overtaken him;
but the shawl hung upon his arm and reminded him of many things--not
altogether unpleasant things, he would have been obliged to confess if
he had not been busy assuring himself that he had no confession to
make. He had done his duty, he said to himself; but there was something
else which he did not dare to say even to himself--something which made
him dissatisfied with his duty now that it was done. Of course he did
not expect her to care about his engagement, but she should have been
sympathetic; well-bred women were always sympathetic, he argued,
arriving at his conclusion by an unanswerable transposition of
adjectives. He turned his light coat collar up about his throat, and the
shawl on his arm brushed his cheek warmly. No man is altogether
colorblind to the danger-signals of his own nature. Did he really want
her to care, after all? he asked himself angrily. He might have spared
himself the trouble of telling her. She was absorbed in herself, or,
what was the same, in that unsavory fraud whom she called father. The
young man unfastened the flap of his tent nervously, and took himself in
out of the drenching mist, which seemed in some way to have got into his
brain. He was angry with himself for his interest in these people, as
he styled them in his l