planting, and so on. When I saw him next, and thanked him, I suppose I
showed some apprehension about his having laid out money on them, and
he, just to ease my mind, invented the story about his getting them for
nothing. When I found out the truth--I got it out of that boy, Harvey
Semple--he admitted it quite frankly--said he was wrong to deceive me."

"This was in the fine first fervor of his term of probation, I suppose,"
put in Theron. He made no effort to dissemble the sneer in his voice.

"Well," answered Alice, with a touch of acerbity, "I have told you
now, and it is off my mind. There never would have been the slightest
concealment about it, if you hadn't begun by keeping me at arm's length,
and making it next door to impossible to speak to you at all, and if--"

"And if he hadn't lied." Theron, as he finished her sentence for her,
rose from the table. Dallying for a brief moment by his chair, there
seemed the magnetic premonition in the air of some further and kindlier
word. Then he turned and walked sedately into the next room, and closed
the door behind him. The talk was finished; and Alice, left alone,
passed the knuckle of her thumb over one swimming eye and then the
other, and bit her lips and swallowed down the sob that rose in her
throat.

CHAPTER XXVIII

It was early afternoon when Theron walked out of his yard, bestowing no
glance upon the withered and tarnished show of the garden, and started
with a definite step down the street. The tendency to ruminative
loitering, which those who saw him abroad always associated with his
tall, spare figure, was not suggested today. He moved forward like a man
with a purpose.

All the forenoon in the seclusion of the sitting-room, with a book
opened before him, he had been thinking hard. It was not the talk with
Alice that occupied his thoughts. That rose in his mind from time to
time, only as a disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. It
was nothing to him, he said to himself, what Gorringe's motives in lying
had been. As for Alice, he hardened his heart against her. Just now
it was her mood to try and make up to him. But it had been something
different yesterday, and who could say what it would be tomorrow? He
really had passed the limit of patience with her shifting emotional
vagaries, now lurching in this direction, now in that. She had had her
chance to maintain a hold upon his interest and imagination, and had
let it slip. These were t