t be the reason why it's
invisible to me."

"I dare not speak at all. You turn my every word into a scourge
against me."

"Don't you feel you deserve the scourging?"

"I have had another melancholy fit," he urged, forced to defend
himself.

"Poor Morgan!" she said, pityingly. "I do believe you have some
trouble that you are keeping to yourself. Do you know, I've been
thinking so for some time now. You don't trust your friends
sufficiently. Come now, isn't my surmise near the truth?"

The tears almost welled up to his eyes. He did not answer her, for he
could not speak at all; but his silence was tantamount to an
admission.

"Poor Morgan!" she repeated softly, as if to herself, and the sympathy
in her voice troubled him still more. "And the trouble? Of course, you
are going to tell me first."

"Well, not to-night," he answered, closing his heart against her with
a superhuman effort. "I must not spoil your evening."

"Do you think I shall enjoy it, now that I know?"

"Why should you not?" he asked, and there was a shade of rebuff in his
tone. A half-savage impulse was urging him to pick a sort of quarrel
with her.

"You are unkind," she exclaimed in distress. "Is my friendship nothing
to you? Perhaps I am wrong to show you that I care about yours. I
ought not to have let you see I was so concerned about your trouble,
but I could not know that was going to vex you."

He did not answer, because her words disarmed him.

"Forgive me, Morgan," she went on gently. "Of course, you are
irritable and all unstrung, and I ought to be very much more patient
instead of flying at you. It would be wicked for us two to quarrel,
but I really do want you to be nice to me."

She was led away just then, and he felt glad to be relieved of the
responsibility of carrying on the conversation.

Dance after dance went by. It hurt him to see that eye-glassed
plausible young man dancing with Margaret. His mood grew hateful. The
hours at length became unendurable. He slipped away quietly and went
home.

But all through the evening he had been conscious in the back part of
his mind of the new life he had embarked upon. And even whilst he held
the sweet lily in his arms, his very love for her bringing him anguish
and bitterness, he was yet aware of scenes that sought to
obtrude--scenes in which figured the wonderful woman with whom he had
thrown in his lot, in which she stood in the glare of the footlights
with a dense packed thea