u say seems to put us
further and further apart. Why, there is nothing for me to forgive, Mr.
West. There was a situation, and it imposed a certain conduct on you;
that is the whole story. I don't come into it at all. It is all a matter
between you and--your own-"

"You do forgive me then? But no--you talk to me just as though you had
learned all this from somebody else--as though I had not come to you
voluntarily and told you everything."

Sharlee did not like to look at his face, which she had always seen
before so confident and gay.

"No," said she sadly--"for I am still your friend."

"_Friend!_"

He echoed the word wildly, contemptuously. He was just on the point of
launching into a passionate speech, painting the bitterness of
friendship to one who must have true love or nothing, and flinging his
hand and his heart impetuously at her feet. But looking at her still
face, he checked himself, and just in time. Shaken by passion as he was,
he was yet enough himself to understand that she would not listen to
him. Why should he play the spendthrift and the wanton with his love?
Why give her, for nothing, the sterile satisfaction of rejecting him,
for her to prize, as he knew girls did, as merely one more notch upon
her gun?

Leaving his tempestuous exclamation hanging in mid-air, West stiffly
shook Sharlee's hand and walked blindly out of the room.

He went home, and to bed, like one moving in a horrible dream. That
night, and through all the next day, he felt utterly bereft and
wretched: something, say, as though flood and pestilence had swept
through his dear old town and carried off everything and everybody but
himself. He crawled alone in a smashed world. On the second day
following, he found himself able to light a cigarette; and, glancing
about him with faint pluckings of convalescent interest, began to
recognize some landmarks. On the third day, he was frankly wondering
whether a girl with such overstrained, not to say hysterical ideals of
conduct, would, after all, be a very comfortable person to spend one's
life with.

On the evening of this day, about half-past eight o'clock, he emerged
from his mother's house, light overcoat over his arm in deference to his
evening clothes, and started briskly down the street. On the second
block, as luck had it, he overtook Tommy Semple walking the same way.

"Gardiner," said Semple, "when are you going to get over all this uplift
rot and come back to Semple and