, leaving Flint inwardly raging.

To be made the butt of a boarding-house table! Really it was too much;
and this girl, of whom he had begun to think rather well--this girl
doubtless mimicked his disconsolate tones and his chattering teeth,
and made all manner of fun of his sorry plight.

Folk with a headache see life quite out of focus; and at the moment it
really would have been a comfort to Flint to know that this mocking
maid had been drowned, or struck by lightning, or in any fashion
disabled from repeating the story of his discomfiture. He writhed and
twisted, and at last fell asleep, still alternately vowing never to
forgive, and never to give her another thought.

In the morning when he woke, free from pain and, except for a certain
languor, quite himself again, he wondered at his childishness of the
night before, though in spite of reason a certain sub-conscious
resentment lingered still.

At seven o'clock Matilda Marsden knocked at his door and gave warning
that the breakfast-hour drew near.

"I say," he called in response, "will you please send some one with a
pitcher of hot water? I'll have my breakfast in bed."

Flint knew perfectly well that she would bring the water herself; but
it was necessary to keep up the fiction of intermediate agency in
deference to her position.

From October until June she was "Miss Marsden," in a shop of a small
New England town; and when from June to October she condescended to
become plain "Tilly," and to lend her assistance to her parents at the
Nepaug Inn, she made it distinctly understood that she did so without
prejudice to her social claims.

She waited at the table to be sure; but she shaded her manner with
nice precision to meet the condition of the guest she served. To the
timid pedler, she was encouraging; to the encroaching commercial
traveller, she was haughty, and to Flint gently and insinuatingly
sympathetic.

Flint, on his part, treated her with the deference which he accorded
to all women; but it never occurred to him to consider her as an
individual at all. To him she was simply an agency for procuring food
and towels; and when she lingered on the stairs, or at the doorway,
making little efforts at conversation, he cut her ruthlessly short.

The result of this mingling of courtesy and neglect was of course that
the girl fell promptly and deeply in love with the young man, cut out
from the current magazines every picture which bore the slightest
res