pretty."

She turned even redder than she always was, and answered nothing,
vigorously darting her brush at an imaginary fly on the cloth. After
several minutes she said abruptly, "You're welcome."

There was a silence, finally broken by a long, gasping sigh. Astonished,
he looked at the girl. Her eyes were set unfathomably upon his pink tie;
the wand had dropped from her nerveless hand, and she stood rapt and
immovable. She started violently from her trance. "Ain't you goin'
to finish your coffee?" she asked, plying her instrument again, and,
bending over him slightly, whispered: "Say, Eph Watts is over there
behind you."

At a table in a far corner of the room a large gentleman in a brown
frock coat was quietly eating his breakfast and reading the "Herald." He
was of an ornate presence, though entirely neat. A sumptuous expanse of
linen exhibited itself between the lapels of his low-cut waistcoat, and
an inch of bediamonded breastpin glittered there, like an ice-ledge on
a snowy mountain side. He had a steady, blue eye and a dissipated,
iron-gray mustache. This personage was Mr. Ephraim Watts, who, following
a calling more fashionable in the eighteenth century than in the latter
decades of the nineteenth, had shaken the dust of Carlow from his feet
some three years previously, at the strong request of the authorities.
The "Herald" had been particularly insistent upon his deportation, and,
in the local phrase, Harkless had "run him out of town." Perhaps it was
because the "Herald's" opposition (as the editor explained at the
time) had been merely moral and impersonal, and the editor had always
confessed to a liking for the unprofessional qualities of Mr. Watts,
that there was but slight embarrassment when the two gentlemen met
to-day. His breakfast finished, Harkless went over to the other and
extended his hand. Cynthia held her breath and clutched the back of
a chair. However, Mr. Watts made no motion toward his well-known hip
pocket. Instead, he rose, flushed slightly, and accepted the hand
offered him.

"I'm glad to see you, Mr. Watts," said the journalist, cordially. "Also,
if you are running with the circus and calculate on doing business here
to-day, I'll have to see that you are fired out of town before noon. How
are you? You're looking extremely well."

"Mr. Harkless," answered Watts, "I cherish no hard feelings, and I never
said but what you done exactly right when I left, three years ago. No,
sir; I'm n