wise and friendly counsel. She remembered
how, as she read, she had been filled with a yearning desire to rise
to the ideal her unknown counsellor had set before her, and filled too
with a longing that Fate might send it in her way, to be something to
him, to return in some measure the spiritual aid and comfort which she
had received at his hands.

"Well," she told herself gloomily, "the opportunity had come, and this
was how she had used it--not only by denying his petition,--that, of
course, was inevitable, feeling as she did,--but by accusing him of
selfishness, by insisting that he should accept her terms of
friendship. _Friendship_, bah!--how stale and flat it sounded! Could
she not have devised some newer way of wounding an honorable man who
had offered her his heart?"

It seemed to her excited consciousness that she must appear to him a
vain and empty coquette, eager to retain a homage for which she
intended no return. When once he awoke to that view, his love would
die out, for he was not a man to continue devotion where he had lost
respect; and so it was all over, or as good as over, between her and
him.

The cab lurched sharply across the tracks at Twenty-Third Street,
jostling Winifred's flowers and fan out of her lap. The maid stooped
to pick them up. As she returned them she caught a glimpse of the set
look in the face of her mistress.

"Are you feelin' bad?" she asked.

"No, no, I am quite well, Maria, only a little tired--are we near
home?"

"Yes'm, we've passed Gramercy Park, and there's the steeples of St.
George's that you see from your windows."

"Yes, yes, I see. Here we are close at home. You may go to bed, Maria,
after you have lighted the lamp in my room. I shall not need you
to-night."

"Well, well," thought the maid, "something's the matter sure. I never
knew no one more fussy about the unhooking of her gown. She can't do
much herself, but she does know how things ought to be done, and
that's what I calls a real lady."

"Winifred, my dear, is that you?" Professor Anstice called, as the
rustle of his daughter's dress caught his ear on the stair.

"Oh, Papa, are you awake still?"

"_Still!_ Why it is not so very late!" said her father, as Winifred
entered the study and threw herself into the deep upholstered chair
beside the fire, which was just graying into ashes in the grate.

Her father was sitting in his cane-seated study-chair with a
conglomeration of volumes piled about the