n a dazed, bewildered way, seeing only the words of her
letter to Fletcher before him, and striving to grasp some other meaning
from them than their coldly practical purport. Perhaps this was her
cruel revenge for his telling her not to write to him. Could she not
have divined it was only his fear of what she might say! And now it
was all over! She had washed her hands of him with the sending of that
manuscript and letter, and he would pass out of her memory as a foolish,
conceited ingrate,--perhaps a figure as wearily irritating and stupid to
her as the cousin she had known. He mechanically lifted his eyes to the
distant hotel; the glow was still in the western sky, but the blue lamp
was already shining in the window. His cheek flushed quickly, and he
turned away as if she could have seen his face. Yes--she despised him,
and THAT was his answer!

When he returned, Mr. Fletcher had gone. He dragged through a dinner
with Mr. Jackson, Fletcher's secretary, and tried to realize his good
fortune in listening to the subordinate's congratulations. "But I
thought," said Jackson, "you had slipped up on your luck to-day, when
the old man sent for you. He was quite white, and ready to rip out about
something that had just come in. I suppose it was one of those anonymous
things against your father,--the old man's dead set against 'em now."
But John Milton heard him vaguely, and presently excused himself for a
row on the moonlit bay.

The active exertion, with intervals of placid drifting along the
land-locked shore, somewhat soothed him. The heaving Pacific beyond
was partly hidden in a low creeping fog, but the curving bay was softly
radiant. The rocks whereon she sat that morning, the hotel where she
was now quietly reading, were outlined in black and silver. In this
dangerous contiguity it seemed to him that her presence returned,--not
the woman who had met him so coldly; who had penned those lines; the
woman from whom he was now parting forever, but the blameless ideal he
had worshiped from the first, and which he now felt could never pass out
of his life again! He recalled their long talks, their rarer rides and
walks in the city; her quick appreciation and ready sympathy; her pretty
curiosity and half-maternal consideration of his foolish youthful past;
even the playful way that she sometimes seemed to make herself younger
as if to better understand him. Lingering at times in the shadow of the
headland, he fancied he saw th