ank you" (she was all sedateness now) "I fear that Principal
Trenholme is suffering very much from his foot and will be kept in for
some time. If you had told me that you had repeated my unjust speeches I
should have asked you to take some apology, to say that I am quite
willing to acknowledge my own--unreasonableness."

He saw that this speech was intended to cover all the ground, and that
he was desired to impart as much of the apology as he believed to be
needed, and no more. He remembered now that he had intended to plead
Robert's cause, but could think of nothing to say except--

"Robert is--Robert really is an awfully good man."

This he said so suddenly and so earnestly looking at her, that she was
betrayed into an unintended answer.

"Is he?" And then in a moment she smiled on him again, and said warmly,
"He certainly is if you say that; a brother knows as no one else can."

She was treating him like a boy again. He did not like it now because
he had felt the sweetness of having her at an advantage. There are some
men who, when they see what they want, stretch out their hands to take
it with no more complexity of thought than a baby has when it reaches
for a toy. At other times Alec Trenholme might consider; just then he
only knew that he wanted to talk longer with this stately girl who was
now retiring. He arrested her steps by making a random dash at the first
question that might detain her.

There was much that, had he known his own mind clearly and how to
express it, he would have liked to say to her. Deep down within him he
was questioning whether it was possible always to live under such
impulse of fealty to Heaven as had befallen him under the exciting
influence of Cameron's expectation, whether the power of such an hour to
sift the good from the evil, the important from the unimportant in life,
could in any wise be retained. But he would have been a wholly different
man from what he was had he thought this concisely, or said it aloud.
All that he did was to express superficial curiosity concerning the
sentiments of others, and to express it inanely enough.

"Do you think," he said, "that all those poor people--my brother's
housekeeper, for instance--do you think they really thought--really
expected--"

"I think--" she said. (She came back to the fence and clasped her hands
upon it in her interest.) "Don't you think, Mr. Trenholme, that a person
who is always seeking the Divine Presence, lives in