oy of her presence
shining in his face. He was not schooled in hiding his feelings, and
his eyes told his secret so plainly that Leslie Graham could not but
read.

She said not another word. They had reached a corner and she suddenly
left her aunt and walked swiftly homeward alone. She had had a
revelation. For a long time she had suspected and feared. Now she
knew. In all her gay thoughtless life she had never wanted anything
very badly that she had not been able to get. Now, the one thing she
wanted most, the thing which had all unconsciously become the supreme
desire of her life, she had learned in one flash was already another's.
She was as certain of it as though Roderick had proclaimed his feelings
from the church pulpit. Her thoughts ran swiftly back over the months
of their acquaintance and picked up here and there little items of
remembrance that should have shown her earlier the true state of
things. She was forced to confess that not once had he shown her any
slightest preference, except as her father's daughter. And yet she had
refused to look and listen. And then, upon knowledge, came shame and
humiliation and rage at finding she had boldly proffered herself and
was found undesirable. It was the birth of her woman's heart. The
happy, careless girl's heart was dying, and the new life did not come
without much anguish of soul.

As soon as she could escape from the dinner table she fled to her room
to face this dread thing which had come upon her. All undisciplined
and unused to pain, through her mother's careless indulgence, entirely
pagan, too, for her religious experience had been but one of form, the
girl met this crisis in her life alone.

At first the smarting sense of her humiliation predominated and her
heart cried for recompense. She would show him what would happen If he
dared set her aside. Well she knew she could injure Roderick's chances
for success if she set her mind to the task; for was it not her
influence that had helped to give him those chances?

The force of her anger drove her to action. She threw on her plumed
hat and her velvet coat, and slipping out unseen, walked swiftly out of
the town and up the lake shore. Every little breeze from the waters
sent a shower of golden leaves dropping about her. But the air was
still in the woods. It was a perfect autumn day, a true Sabbath day in
Nature's world, with everything in a beautiful state of rest after
labour. The b