ieve you
really would unless we said so. That's all there is about it; and if
there is anybody to blame, I am the one. Barbara would never have done
it in the world if I hadn't put her up to it."

In those words the implication that Miss Bingham had operated the whole
affair finally unfolded itself. But distasteful as the fact was to
Langbourne, and wounding as was the realization that he had been led on
by this witness of his infatuation for the sake of the entertainment
which his letters gave two girls in the dull winter of a mountain
village, there was still greater pain, with an additional embarrassment,
in the regret which the words conveyed. It appeared that it was not he
who had done the wrong; he had suffered it, and so far from having to
offer reparation to a young girl for having unwarrantably wrought her up
expect of him a step from which he afterwards recoiled, he had the duty
of forgiving her a trespass on his own invaded sensibilities. It was
humiliating to his vanity; it inflicted a hurt to something better than
his vanity. He began very uncomfortably: "It's all right, as far as I'm
concerned. I had no business to address Miss Simpson in the first
place--"

"Well," Miss Bingham interrupted, "that's what I told Barbara; but she
got to feeling badly about it; she thought if you had taken the trouble
to send back the circular that she dropped in the hotel, she couldn't do
less than acknowledge it, and she kept on so about it that I had to let
her. That was the first false step."

These words, while they showed Miss Simpson in a more amiable light, did
not enable Langbourne to see Miss Bingham's merit so clearly. In the
methodical and consecutive working of his emotions, he was aware that it
was no longer a question of divided allegiance, and that there could
never be any such question again. He perceived that Miss Bingham had not
such a good figure as he had fancied the night before, and that her eyes
were set rather too near together. While he dropped his own eyes, and
stood trying to think what he should say in answer to her last speech,
her high, sweet voice tinkled out in gay challenge, "How do, John?"

He looked up and saw a square-set, brown-faced young man advancing
towards them in his shirt-sleeves; he came deliberately, finding his way
in and out among the logs, till he stood smiling down, through a heavy
mustache and thick black lashes, into the face of the girl, as if she
were some sort of jok