l sorts of queer
things, and outgrow them. Your brother evidently has a taste for queer
people, and very likely he's been at least half sincere when he's made
you believe he had a literary motive behind it. We all go through----"

"Thanks, Mr. Russell," she interrupted. "Let's don't say any more."

He looked at her flushed face and enlarged eyes; and he liked her all
the better for her indignation: this was how good sisters ought to feel,
he thought, failing to understand that most of what she felt was not
about Walter. He ventured only a word more. "Try not to mind it so much;
it really doesn't amount to anything."

She shook her head, and they went on in silence; she did not look at him
again until they stopped before her own house. Then she gave him only
one glimpse of her eyes before she looked down. "It's spoiled, isn't
it?" she said, in a low voice.

"What's 'spoiled?'"

"Our walk--well, everything. Somehow it always--is."

"'Always is' what?" he asked.

"Spoiled," she said.

He laughed at that; but without looking at him she suddenly offered him
her hand, and, as he took it, he felt a hurried, violent pressure upon
his fingers, as if she meant to thank him almost passionately for being
kind. She was gone before he could speak to her again.

In her room, with the door locked, she did not go to her mirror, but to
her bed, flinging herself face down, not caring how far the pillows
put her hat awry. Sheer grief had followed her anger; grief for
the calamitous end of her bright afternoon, grief for the "end of
everything," as she thought then. Nevertheless, she gradually grew more
composed, and, when her mother tapped on the door presently, let her in.
Mrs. Adams looked at her with quick apprehension.

"Oh, poor child! Wasn't he----"

Alice told her. "You see how it--how it made me look, mama," she
quavered, having concluded her narrative. "I'd tried to cover up
Walter's awfulness at the dance with that story about his being
'literary,' but no story was big enough to cover this up--and oh! it
must make him think I tell stories about other things!"

"No, no, no!" Mrs. Adams protested. "Don't you see? At the worst, all HE
could think is that Walter told stories to you about why he likes to be
with such dreadful people, and you believed them. That's all HE'D think;
don't you see?"

Alice's wet eyes began to show a little hopefulness. "You honestly think
it might be that way, mama?"

"Why, from what yo