air, Aurora asked suddenly:

"Haven't we had enough of this?" and ordered the coachman to go home.

"Why!" exclaimed Estelle, astonished, "I thought we were going to Gerald
Fane's to see how he's getting along!"

"No, I guess we won't. I think it's time, after living with him for
three weeks, that I began to look after my reputation, don't you?" said
Aurora, with a forced lightness of rather bitter effect.

"I had a note from him, anyhow, just before we came out," she added
after a moment. "He's doing all right."

Estelle understood that something was wrong. Aurora could not
successfully pretend with her. Aurora's transparent face, as she now
took note of it, betrayed hidden perplexity and chagrin. Estelle asked
no questions, not needing to be told that Gerald's note had worked the
change. Despite her affection for her friend, indeed, just because of
that affection, Estelle was quietly glad of it. Her thought caressed the
secret which has been referred to, a scheme which for some weeks had
given her an excited feeling of having between her fingers the thread of
the Fates.

After Estelle had gone to her own room for the night, Aurora sat down to
compose an answer to Gerald's letter. She had reflected a good deal
since receiving it, and out of confusion and complexity singled one
clear and simple thought or two.

Gerald had never said or intimated that she had forced herself upon him
when he was too ill to help it; but the truth was she had done that,
after all his shying rocks at her, too, to keep her off. Nor had Gerald
suggested that one of his reasons for wishing her not to haunt his
bedside was a fear of her becoming inconveniently fond of him. A hint
could be found, if one chose, that he feared becoming too fond of her,
but of the other no vestige, no shadow, or ghost of a shadow. Yet by
those two points the spirit of Aurora's reply must be inspired.
Centuries of civilization have ground into the female of the species one
particular lesson.

So the irascible man's nervous, hurried and harried scrawl, written with
sputtering pen that at several places tore clean through the paper, and
written under the compulsion of his soul and his good sense, received
from the best of women an answer in her calmest hand, deliberately
calculated to give him pain, at the same time as to convey to him
unambiguously that, as far as she was concerned, he was freer than the
birds of the air. She wrote:

My dear friend Gera