all you wished to say to me, Mr. Paine?"

"Miss Colton, I should like to explain if I could. But I cannot."

"Pray don't trouble yourself. I assure you I had no intentions of asking
for your--reasons. Good afternoon."

I heard her skirts brush the leaves at the border of the path. She was
going; and the contemptuous slur at my "reasons" proved that she did not
believe them existent. She believed me to be a liar.

"Miss Colton," I said, sharply; "wait."

She kept on.

"Wait," I said again. "Listen to me."

She seemed to hesitate and then turned her head.

"I am listening," she said. "What is it?"

"You have no right to disbelieve me."

"I disbelieve you? Why should you think I disbelieve you? I am not
sufficiently interested to believe or disbelieve, I assure you."

"But you do. You judge me--"

"_I_ judge you! You flatter yourself, Mr. Paine."

"But you do. You apologized just now for judging me without a hearing
the other day. You acknowledged that you should not have done it. You
are doing the same thing now."

"I apologized for presuming to offer advice to a stranger. I did not
apologize for the advice itself. I think it good. I do not care to argue
the matter further."

"You are not asked to argue. But your sneer at my reasons proves that
you believe that I have none and am merely trying to justify myself with
trumped up and lying excuses. You are wrong, and since you presumed to
judge me then you must listen to me now. I have--or had--reasons for
living as I have done, for being the idler and good-for-nothing you
believe me to be. I can't tell you what they are; I can tell no one. But
I do ask you to believe that I have them, that they are real, and that
my being what you termed ambitionless and a country loafer is not my
condition from choice. It is my right to insist upon your believing
that. Do you believe it?"

At last I had made an impression. My earnestness seemed to have shaken
her contemptuous indifference. She looked at me steadily, frowning a
little, but regarding me less as if I were a clod and more and more as
if I were the puzzle she had once declared me to be. I did not shun her
look now, but met it eye to eye.

"Do you believe me?" I demanded.

Slowly her frown was disappearing.

"Do you believe me?" I said, again. "You must."

"Must?"

"Yes, you must. I shall make you. If not now, at some other time. You
must believe me, Miss Colton."

The frown disappeared altogether a