e troubled; he dropped his eyes. Ethel trembled--she
loved him, poor girl, and she thought that he suffered as she had
suffered, and she was sorry for him. But her outraged pride would not
let her make any advance as yet.

"I may be a fatuous fool," said Oliver, after an agitated pause, "but I
thought you loved me."

"I do love you," cried Ethel, passionately.

"And yet you suspect me of being false to you."

"Not suspect--not suspect"--she said, incoherently, and then, was
suddenly folded in Oliver's arms, and felt that the time for reproach or
inquiry had gone by.

She was not sorry that matters had ended in this way, although she felt
it to be illogical. With his kisses upon her mouth, with the pressure of
his arm enfolding her, it was almost impossible for her to maintain, in
his presence, a doubt of him. It was when he had gone that all the facts
which he had ignored came back to her with torturing insistence, and
that she blamed herself for not having refused to be reconciled to him
until she had ascertained the truth or untruth of a report that had
reached her ears.

With a truer lover she might have gone unsatisfied to her dying day. A
faithful-hearted man might never have perceived where she was hurt; he
would not have been astute enough to discover that he might heal the
wound by a few timely words of explanation. Oliver, keenly alive to his
own interests, reopened the subject a few days later of his own accord.

They had completely made up their quarrel--to all outward appearance, at
any rate--and were sitting together one afternoon in Ethel's obnoxious
drawing-room. They had been laughing together at some funny story of
Ethel's associates at the theatre, and to the laughter had succeeded a
silence, during which Oliver possessed himself of the girl's hand and
carried it gently to his lips.

"Ethel," he said, softly, "what made you so angry with me the other
day?"

"Your bad behavior, I suppose!" she said, trying to treat the matter in
her usual lively fashion.

"But what _was_ my misbehavior? Did it consist in going so often to the
Brookes'?"

"Oh, what does it matter?" exclaimed Ethel, petulantly. "Didn't we agree
to forgive and forget? If we didn't, we ought to have done. I don't want
to look back."

"But you are doing an injustice to me. Ethel, I dare not say to you that
I _insist_ on knowing what it was. But I very strongly _wish_ that you
would tell me--so that I might at least try to set