while
his own dimmed shoes peregrinated in the opposite direction--William
necessarily, yet with excruciating reluctance, accompanying them. But
just at the moment when he and the lovely creature were side by side,
and her head turned from him, she spoke that is, she murmured, but he
caught the words.

"You Flopit, wake up!" she said, in the tone of a mother talking
baby-talk. "SO indifferink!"

William's feet and his breath halted spasmodically. For an instant he
thought she had spoken to him, and then for the first time he perceived
the fluffy head of the dog bobbing languidly over her arm, with the
motion of her walking, and he comprehended that Flopit, and not William
Sylvanus Baxter, was the gentleman addressed. But--but had she MEANT
him?

His breath returning, though not yet operating in its usual manner,
he stood gazing after her, while the glamorous parasol passed down the
shady street, catching splashes of sunshine through the branches of
the maple-trees; and the cottony head of the tiny dog continued to be
visible, bobbing rhythmically over a filmy sleeve. Had she meant that
William was indifferent? Was it William that she really addressed?

He took two steps to follow her, but a suffocating shyness stopped him
abruptly and, in a horror lest she should glance round and detect him
in the act, he turned and strode fiercely to the gate of his own home
before he dared to look again. And when he did look, affecting great
casualness in the action, she was gone, evidently having turned the
corner. Yet the street did not seem quite empty; there was still
something warm and fragrant about it, and a rosy glamor lingered in
the air. William rested an elbow upon the gate-post, and with his chin
reposing in his hand gazed long in the direction in which the unknown
had vanished. And his soul was tremulous, for she had done her work but
too well.

"'Indifferink'!" he murmured, thrilling at his own exceedingly
indifferent imitation of her voice. "Indifferink!" that was just what he
would have her think--that he was a cold, indifferent man. It was what
he wished all girls to think. And "sarcastic"! He had been envious one
day when May Parcher said that Joe Bullitt was "awfully sarcastic."
William had spent the ensuing hour in an object-lesson intended to make
Miss Parcher see that William Sylvanus Baxter was twice as sarcastic
as Joe Bullitt ever thought of being, but this great effort had been
unsuccessful, because W