hen, with a sob, he cast the little whip from him and
burst from the room.

Orde sat without moving, while two red lines slowly defined themselves
across his face. The theatrical quality of the scene and the turgid
rhetorical bathos of the boy's speeches attested his youth and the
unformed violence of his emotions. Did they also indicate a rehearsal,
or had the boy merely been goaded to vague action by implicit belief in
a woman's vagaries? Orde did not know, but the incident brought home to
him, as nothing else could, the turmoil of that household.

"Poor youngster!" he concluded his reverie, and went to wash his face in
hot water.

He had left Carroll that afternoon in a comparatively philosophical
and hopeful frame of mind. The next day she came to him with hurried,
nervous steps, her usually pale cheeks mounting danger signals of
flaming red, her eyes swimming. When she greeted him she choked, and two
of the tears overflowed. Quite unmindful of the nursemaids across the
square, Orde put his arm comfortingly about her shoulder. She hid her
face against his sleeve and began softly to cry.

Orde did not attempt as yet to draw from her the cause of this unusual
agitation. A park bench stood between two dense bushes, screened from
all directions save one. To this he led her. He comforted her as one
comforts a child, stroking clumsily her hair, murmuring trivialities
without meaning, letting her emotion relieve itself. After awhile she
recovered somewhat her control of herself and sat up away from him,
dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief dampened into a tiny wad. But
even after she had shaken her head vigorously at last, and smiled up at
him rather tremulously in token that the storm was over, she would not
tell him that anything definite had happened to bring on the outburst.

"I just needed you," she said, "that's all. It's just nothing but being
a woman, I think. You'll get used to little things like that."

"This thing has got to quit!" said he grimly.

She said nothing, but reached up shyly and touched his face where
Kendrick's whip had stung, and her eyes became very tender. A carriage
rolled around Washington Arch, and, coming to a stand, discharged its
single passenger on the pavement.

"Why, it's Gerald!" cried Carroll, surprised.

The young man, catching sight of them, picked his way daintily and
leisurely toward them. He was, as usual, dressed with meticulous nicety,
the carnation in his button-ho