boat is
gone. I do not want any one to see you have been crying."

When her misty eyes could no longer see the boat that bore her heart
away, she turned, and all the long, lonely way back love's tears
lingered on her lashes.

CHAPTER XXXVII

AMID FALLING LEAVES

The mountains around Sandgate were aflame with the scarlet and gold of
autumn before life seemed quite as usual to Alice Page. The summer idyll
had passed, and though it left a scar on her heart, she had resolutely
determined to put the sweet illusion out of her mind. "I was very
foolish to let him see that I cared," she thought, "for it can never be,
and by and by he will forget me, or if he does think of me, it will be
to recall me as one of his summer girls who had a fit of silliness."

But for all that her heart ached at times, and in spite of all
resolution her fingers would once in a while stray to the chords of "Ben
Bolt." She tried, and fairly succeeded in answering his letters in a
cool, matter-of-fact way. Occasionally when he referred to his heart
hunger, and how hard he was studying in hopes that she might think
better of him, she wished that he had no purse-proud and haughty mother
to stand between him and a poor girl, and her next letter would be more
chilly than ever. What perhaps was a bitter-sweet thought was the fact
that the colder she answered him, the warmer his next letter would be.
Unwisely, too, he happened to mention once that his mother had spoken of
a certain young lady who belonged to the cream of Boston society as an
eligible match, and advised him to show her a little attention. It was
really of no moment, yet it hardened Alice against his mother, and did
not help his cause.

Every Sunday she took her wonted place in the choir, and after church
occasionally walked alone to the cemetery and visited her mother's
grave. Then, too, her brother's letters grew less frequent, and that was
a source of pain. With intuitive and feminine instinct she began to
assume that some woman was winning his thoughts, and as it was but
natural, she could not and did not mention her belief to him. How
grateful she was all through those melancholy autumn days that she had a
large school to absorb her thoughts, no one, not even Aunt Susan,
guessed. She was having a long and hard fight with her own feelings and
imagined she had conquered them, when Thanksgiving time drew near and
her brother announced he would run up and spend the day with he