cacy. I suppose
he wants to disarm public opinion!"

Radowitz looked oddly at Sorell from under his finely marked eyebrows.

"I don't believe he cares a hang for public opinion," he said slowly.
"Nor do I. If you could come, of course that would settle it. And if you
won't come to see me, supposing Falloden and I do share diggings, that
settles it too. But you will come, old man--you will come!"

And he nodded, smiling, at hid quasi-guardian. Neither of them noticed
Connie. Yet she had hung absorbed on their conversation, the breath
fluttering on her parted lips. And when their talk paused, she bent
forward, and laid her hand on Sorell's arm:

"Let him!" she said pleadingly--"let him do it!"

Sorell looked at her in troubled perplexity. "Let Douglas Falloden make
some amends to his victim; if he can, and will. Don't be so unkind as to
prevent it!" That, he supposed, was what she meant. It seemed to him the
mere sentimental unreason of the young girl, who will not believe that
there is any irrevocableness in things at all, till life teaches her.

Radowitz too! What folly, what mistaken religiosity could make him dream
of consenting to such a house-mate through this winter which might
be his last!

Monstrous! What kind of qualities had Falloden to fit him for such a
task? All very well, indeed, that he should feel remorse! Sorell hoped
he might feel it a good deal more sharply yet. But that he should ease
his remorse at Otto's expense, by offering what he could never fulfil,
and by taking the place of some one on whom Otto could have really
leaned--that seemed to Sorell all of a piece with the man's egotism, his
epicurean impatience of anything that permanently made him uncomfortable
or unhappy. He put something of this into impetuous words as well as he
could. But Otto listened in silence. So did Constance. And Sorell
presently felt that there was a secret bond between them.

* * * * *

Before the aunts returned, the rectory pony-carriage came for Radowitz,
who was not strong enough to walk both ways. Sorell and Constance were
left alone.

Sorell, observing her, was struck anew by the signs of change and
development in her. It was as though her mother and her mother's soul
showed through the girl's slighter temperament. The old satiric
aloofness in Connie's brown eyes, an expression all her own, and not her
mother's, seemed to have slipped away; Sorell missed it. Ella
Risborough