nd ran down the
japonica-bordered path to the garden.

Seating herself under a crape-myrtle tree, its pink blossoms glowing
amid the deep, glossy green of its leaves, like the blush of the sunset
on an April cloud, she rested her chin in the palm of her hand, and
looked, half-thoughtfully, half-defiantly, at the ground.

So Phil was not going to return to Oakdale; he did not care for any of
his old friends; and this was gratitude. Yet what had he to be grateful
for? The debt was all on her side, and the affection, too, for that
matter; and the one, she thought, ought to balance the other.

"Lelia!"

Phil had contrived to elude Bess' fox-like vigilance, and when she was
busy with her tea-set, followed Lelia into the garden, to try and find
out what it was that had so mightily offended his old playmate.

"Well?" she said, shortly.

"I've something to give you," Phil began, in a business-like tone--"not
to give you, exactly, but to return to you."

And he put in her hand the identical little white envelope she had given
him at Oakdale the evening before their departure for Florida.

It was worn and soiled, and all its former freshness gone; but it
contained five crisp ten-dollar notes, every penny of Phil's small
earnings since he had been in Mr. Herdic's employ, and "squared accounts
between them," as he said, with a satisfied smile.

Lelia was in one of her grand, womanly moods, and seemed to put her
childhood and childhood's tempers and jealousies away from her as one
might an outgrown garment.

She looked as she did the day she had urged her uncle to befriend
Oakdale's "bad boy," and her hand closed over the envelope in a slow,
proud way, as if she hated, yet strangely valued, the few poor
bank-notes it held, hoarded, she knew, with so much self-denial and
miserly care, that "accounts might be squared between them," and Phil no
longer her debtor.

"It's all there," he said, after an awkward pause, seeing that she did
not seem inclined to take any further notice of it.

"Of course it is. Don't I know that?"

"But you have not counted it."

"No; but haven't you _said_ it was all there, and isn't that enough?"

Phil unconsciously drew himself up, and a glad light shone in his eyes.
He was proud of her confidence in his word, and prouder still to feel
himself not altogether unworthy of her good opinion.

"The time we have been here, and all the queer things that have happened
to us since we left Oakdale