ered--saw nothing, thought
of nothing save the flushed face with its glorious eyes and tempting
lips: the eyes and lips of the daughter of men.

She broke away from him hotly after he had taken the flushed face
between his hands and kissed her; broke away to drop into the chair at
the other side of the table, hiding the flashing eyes and the burning
cheeks and the quivering lips in the crook of a round arm which made
room for itself on the narrow table by pushing the japanned money-box
off the opposite edge.

It was the normal Griswold who picked up the box and put it in the other
chair, gravely and methodically. Then he stood before her again with
his back to the wall, waiting for what every gentle drop of blood in his
veins was telling him he richly deserved. His punishment was long in
coming; so long that when he made sure she was crying, he began to
invite it.

"Say it," he suggested gently, "you needn't spare me at all. The only
excuse I could offer would only make the offence still greater."

She looked up quickly and the dark eyes were swimming. But whether the
tears were of anger or only of outraged generosity, he could not tell.

"Then there was an excuse?" she flashed up at him.

"No," he denied, as one who finds the second thought the worthier;
"there was no excuse."

She had found a filmy bit of lace-bordered linen at her belt and was
furtively wiping her lips with it.

"I thought perhaps you might be able to--to invent one of some sort,"
she said, and her tone was as colorless as the gray skies of an autumn
nightfall. And then, with a childlike appeal in the wonderful eyes: "I
think you will have to help me a little--out of your broader experience,
you know. What ought I to do?"

His reply came hot from the refining-fire of self-abasement.

"You should write me down as one who wasn't worthy of your
loving-kindness and compassion, Miss Grierson. Then you should call the
custodian and turn me out."

"But afterward," she persisted pathetically. "There must be an
afterward?"

"I am leaving Mereside this evening," he reminded her. "It will be for
you to say whether its doors shall ever open to me again."

She took the thin safety-deposit key from her glove and laid it on the
table.

"You have made me wish there hadn't been any money," she lamented, with
a sorrowful little catch in her voice that stabbed him like a knife. "I
haven't so many friends that I can afford to lose them recklessly, Mr.