pt at friendly badinage,--

"I waited for you over there to come back, but you never came."

"Waited where, sir?" she asked softly, and her light-colored eyes
expanded more than before.

She was much older; she looked tired and wasted.

"Well," I said, "I waited at Havre."

She stared; then she recognized me. She smiled and blushed and clasped
her two hands together. "I remember you now," she said. "I remember that
day." But she stood there, neither coming out nor asking me to come in.
She was embarrassed.

I, too, felt a little awkward. I poked my stick into the path. "I kept
looking out for you, year after year," I said.

"You mean in Europe?" murmured Miss Spencer.

"In Europe, of course! Here, apparently, you are easy enough to find."

She leaned her hand against the unpainted doorpost, and her head fell a
little to one side. She looked at me for a moment without speaking, and
I thought I recognized the expression that one sees in women's eyes
when tears are rising. Suddenly she stepped out upon the cracked slab
of stone before the threshold and closed the door behind her. Then she
began to smile intently, and I saw that her teeth were as pretty as
ever. But there had been tears too.

"Have you been there ever since?" she asked, almost in a whisper.

"Until three weeks ago. And you--you never came back?"

Still looking at me with her fixed smile, she put her hand behind her
and opened the door again. "I am not very polite," she said. "Won't you
come in?"

"I am afraid I incommode you."

"Oh, no!" she answered, smiling more than ever. And she pushed back the
door, with a sign that I should enter.

I went in, following her. She led the way to a small room on the left of
the narrow hall, which I supposed to be her parlor, though it was at the
back of the house, and we passed the closed door of another apartment
which apparently enjoyed a view of the quince-trees. This one looked
out upon a small woodshed and two clucking hens. But I thought it very
pretty, until I saw that its elegance was of the most frugal kind; after
which, presently, I thought it prettier still, for I had never seen
faded chintz and old mezzotint engravings, framed in varnished autumn
leaves, disposed in so graceful a fashion. Miss Spencer sat down on a
very small portion of the sofa, with her hands tightly clasped in her
lap. She looked ten years older, and it would have souuded very perverse
now to speak of her as pretty. But I