te again.

"Miss Bingham, I think--I think I had better not go."

"Why, just as you feel about it, Mr. Langbourne," she assented.

"I will bring the letters this evening, if you will let me--if Miss
Simpson--if you will be at home."

"We shall be very happy to see you, Mr. Langbourne," said the girl
formally, and then he went back to his hotel.

XI.

Langbourne could not have told just why he had withdrawn his acceptance
of Miss Bingham's invitation. If at the moment it was the effect of a
quite reasonless panic, he decided later that it was because he wished
to think. It could not be said, however, that he did think, unless
thinking consists of a series of dramatic representations which the mind
makes to itself from a given impulse, and which it is quite powerless to
end. All the afternoon, which Langbourne spent in his room, his mind was
the theatre of scenes with Miss Simpson, in which he perpetually evolved
the motives governing him from the beginning, and triumphed out of his
difficulties and embarrassments. Her voice, as it acquiesced in all, no
longer related itself to that imaginary personality which had inhabited
his fancy. That was gone irrevocably; and the voice belonged to the
likeness of Barbara, and no other; from her similitude, little, quaint,
with her hair of cloudy red and her large, dim-sighted eyes, it played
upon the spiritual sense within him with the coaxing, drolling, mocking
charm which he had felt from the first. It blessed him with intelligent
and joyous forgiveness. But as he stood at her gate that evening this
unmerited felicity fell from him. He now really heard her voice, through
the open doorway, but perhaps because it was mixed with other
voices--the treble of Miss Bingham, and the bass of a man who must be
the Mr. Dickery he had seen at the saw mills--he turned and hurried back
to his hotel, where he wrote a short letter saying that he had decided
to take the express for New York that night. With an instinctive
recognition of her authority in the affair, or with a cowardly shrinking
from direct dealing with Barbara, he wrote to Juliet Bingham, and he
addressed to her the packet of letters which he sent for Barbara.
Superficially, he had done what he had no choice but to do. He had been
asked to return her letters, and he had returned them, and brought the
affair to an end.

In his long ride to the city he assured himself in vain that he was
doing right if he was not sure of hi