es--"why is it you acted this way? Was it Lord Hastings? I refused
him two weeks ago. I thought I'd marry him once, but that was before I
knew you. Then I waited for you, and you didn't come, and I wrote to
you, and you wouldn't come. And so I had to come and tell you myself,
and it's been something dreadful."

Faraday made no response, but feeling the smooth hands curled warm
inside his, he stood listening to those soft accents that issued with
the sweetness that love alone lends to women's voices from lips he had
thought as far beyond his reach as the key of the rainbow.

"Do you think it was awful for me to do it?" she queried, in whispering
anxiety.

He shook his head.

"Well," she said, laughing a little and turning her head half away, as
her former embarrassment began to reassert itself over her subsiding
nervousness, "I've often wished I was a man, but if it's always as awful
as that to propose to a person, I'm quite content to be a woman."

GIDEON'S KNOCK

BY

MARY HALLECK FOOTE

Written for THE SPINNERS' BOOK OF FICTION

_All Rights Reserved_

BY A curious coincidence, whenever George Fleming was translated to a
wider berth, it was my luck to succeed him in the job he had just
quitted. This had happened more than once, in the chances and changes
that befall the younger men in the mining profession, before we began to
jolly each other about it--always at long range.

When I heard he had resigned from the Consolidated Resumption, to
everybody's surprise, at a time of great prosperity to the mine, I
hailed my chance and congratulated myself that I should speedily be
asked to fill his place: and I was!

I wrote him on the spot a playful letter, alluding to my long, stern
chase and begging him to hold on this time till I could shake him by the
hand; I had come to have a personal sentiment toward him apart from the
natural desire to meet face to face the author of my continued
advancement. But to this letter I received no word of reply.

His silence haunted me, rather--I thought about him a good deal while I
was closing up my affairs in other directions before taking over the
Consolidated Resumption. Meanwhile the company's cashier, Joshua Dean,
a man of trust but small initiative, was filling the interregnum.

I found him living alone in the manager's house with the Flemings'
Chinese cook as man of all work. The Resumption has never tolerated a
boarding-house or a village or compound within