the other troubles, home
troubles, which I know are very trying, need not overwhelm you. You are
much less manly, Walter, now you are a man, than I expected you to be.
You have quite disappointed me, and without reason.'

He was surprised, and could not hide it. The gentle, simple, shrinking
girl had changed into a self-reliant, keen-sighted woman, and from the
serene height of her gracious womanhood calmly convicted him of his
folly and his besetting weakness, and, manlike, his first impulse, thus
convicted, was to resent her interference.

'Whatever I may do, it can't affect you now, you are so far removed from
me,' he said, without looking at her; and Gladys, disappointed, and a
little indignant, rose to go.

'Very well; good-bye. It is always the same kind of good-bye,' she said
quietly. 'If ever, when you look back upon it, it should grieve you,
remember it was always your doing, yours alone. But even yet, though you
may not believe it, Walter, your old friend will remain quite
unchanged.'

His face flushed, and he dashed his hand with a hasty gesture across his
eyes.

'I am not changed,' he said huskily. 'You need not reproach me with
that. You know nothing about the struggle it is for me here, nor what I
have to fight against. It was you who taught me first to be discontented
with my lot, to strive after something higher. I sometimes wish now that
we had never met.'

'Whatever happens, Walter, I shall never wish that; and I hope one day
you will be sorry for ever having said such a thing,' she said, with a
proud ring in her clear, sweet voice. 'I hope--I hope one day everything
will be made right; just now it all seems so very wrong and hard to
bear.'

She left him hurriedly then, just as she had left him before, at the
moment when he could have thrown himself at her feet, and revealed to
her all the surging passion of his soul.

Gladys felt so saddened and disheartened that she could not bear to
return to Bellairs Crescent, to the inevitable questioning which she
knew awaited her there. If the Fordyces were kind, they were also a
trifle fussy, and sometimes nettled Gladys by their too obvious and
exacting interest in her concerns. She ran up to the office in St.
Vincent Street, and told Mr. Fordyce she was going off to Mauchline by
the one-o'clock train, and begged him to send a boy with an explanation
to the Crescent. Mr. Fordyce was very good-natured, and not at all
curious; it never occurred to hi