bard is coming down to-morrow night and if you don't stay as
you promised I'll go to the Swan with him. He has been teasing me to go
for ages and I wouldn't, but I will now, if you leave me. I'll--I'll do
anything."

Ted was worried. He did not like the sound of the girl's threats though
he wasn't moved from his own purpose.

"Don't go to the Swan with Hubbard, Madeline. You mustn't."

"Why not? You took me."

"I know I did, but that is different," he finished lamely.

"I don't see anything very different," she retorted hotly.

Ted bit his lip. Remembering his own recent aberration, he did not see as
much difference as he would have liked to see himself.

"I suppose you wouldn't have taken _your_ kind of girl to the Swan,"
taunted Madeline.

"No, I--"

It was a fatal admission. Ted hadn't meant to make it so bluntly, but it
was out. The damage was done.

A demon of rage possessed the girl. Beside herself with anger she sprang
to her feet and delivered a stinging blow straight in the boy's face.
Then, her mood changing, she fell back into the hammock sobbing bitterly.

For a moment Ted was too much astonished by this fish-wife exhibition
of temper even to be angry with himself. Then a hot wave of wrath and
shame surged over him. He put up his hand to his cheek as if to brush
away the indignity of the blow. But he was honest enough to realize
that maybe he had deserved the punishment, though not for the reason
the girl had dealt it.

Looking down at her in her racked misery, his resentment vanished and
an odd impersonal kind of pity for her possessed him instead, though
her attraction was gone forever. He could see the scar on her forehead,
and it troubled and reproached him vaguely, seemed a symbol of a deeper
wound he had dealt her, though never meaning any harm. He bent over
her, gently.

"Forgive me, Madeline," he said. "I am sorry--sorry for
everything. Goodby."

In a moment he was gone, past the portulaca and love-lies-bleeding, past
Cousin Emma's unlit parlor windows, down the walk between the tiger
lilies and peonies, out into the street. And Madeline, suddenly
realizing that she was alone, rushed after him, calling his name softly
into the dark. But only the echo of his firm, buoyant young feet came
back to her straining ears. She fled back to the garden and, throwing
herself, face down, on the dew drenched grass, surrendered to a passion
of tearless grief.

Ted astonished his uncle, first by