if
you wish, but I'm not particularly sorry."

She showed him her hands then, spread them before him. They trembled,
but that was all. They recorded no marks of his precipitancy.

"I shouldn't expect you to be sorry. After that certainly you will never
speak to me again."

"Will you tell me now who it is?" he asked.

Her temper blazed.

"I ought always to know what to expect from you."

She ran back to the door through which she had entered.

"Oh, Dolly!"

Dalrymple met her on the threshold.

"Take me for a walk," she said. "It won't hurt you."

Dalrymple indicated George.

"Morton coming?"

She shook her head and ran lightly upstairs.

"No, I'm not going," George said. "She's right. The fresh air will do
you good."

"Thanks," Dalrymple answered, petulantly. "I'm quite capable of
prescribing for myself."

He went out in search of his hat and coat.

George watched him, letting all his dislike escape. Continually they
hovered on the edge of a break, but Dalrymple wouldn't quite permit it
now. George was confident that the seed sown last night would flower.

He was glad when Mundy telephoned before dinner about some difficulties
of transportation that might have been solved the next day. George
sprang at the excuse, however, refused Blodgett's offer of a car to
town, and drove to the station.

Dalrymple and Sylvia hadn't returned.

XII

In town Goodhue, too, read his discontent.

"You look tired out, George," he said the next morning. "Evidently
Blodgett's party wasn't much benefit."

"I'm learning to dislike parties," George answered. "You were wise to
duck it. What was the matter? Didn't fancy the Blodgett brand of
hospitality?"

"Promised my mother to spend the week-end at Westbury. I'd have enjoyed
it. I'm really growing fond of Blodgett."

There it was again, and you couldn't question Goodhue. Always he said
just what he meant, or he kept his opinions to himself. Every word of
praise for Blodgett reached George as a direct charge of disloyalty, of
bad judgment, of narrow-mindedness. His irritation increased. He was
grateful for the mass of work in which he was involved. That chained his
imagination by day, but at night he wearily reviewed the past five
years, seeking his points of weakness, some fatal omission.

Perhaps his chief fault had been too self-centred a pursuit of Sylvia.
Because of her he had repressed the instincts to which he saw other men
pandering as a matter of cou