that we dine in half an hour or do you
think, if she's so very hungry, you might hurry it up a bit?"

"In half an hour--she'll want a little time," replied his mother, and
she added presently, "but she's so proud, poor thing, that I don't
believe she'll come."

The words were said softly, but had they been spoken in a louder tone,
Trent would not have heard them for he had already hastened from the
room.

In response to his knock, Christina opened her door almost immediately,
and when she recognised him a look of surprise appeared upon her face.

"Won't you come in?" she asked, drawing slightly aside with a politeness
which he felt to be an effort to her, "my room is not very orderly, but
perhaps you will not mind?"

She wore a simple cotton blouse, the sleeves of which were a little
rumpled as if they had been rolled up above her elbows, and her skirt of
some ugly brown stuff was shabby and partly frayed about the edges--but
when she looked at him with her sincere blue eyes, he forgot the
disorder of her dress in the touching pathos of her gallant little
figure. She was very pretty, he saw, in a fragile yet resolute way--like
a child that is possessed of a will of iron--and because of her
prettiness he found himself resenting her literary failures with an
acute personal resentment. The tenderness of his sympathy seemed to
increase rather than diminish his hopeless love for Laura, and while he
gazed at Christina's flower-like eyes and smooth brown hair, which shone
like satin, there stole over him a poetic melancholy that was altogether
pleasant. It was as if he had suddenly discovered a companion in his
unhappiness, and he thought all at once that it would be charming to
pour the sorrows of his love into the pretty ears hidden so quaintly
under the smooth brown hair. Love, at the moment, appeared to him
chiefly as something to be talked about--an emotion which one might turn
effectively into the spoken phrase.

She drew back into the room and he followed her while his sympathetic
glance dwelt upon the sleeping couch under its daytime covering of
cretonne, upon the small gas stove on which a kettle boiled, upon the
cupboard, the dressing table, the desk at which she wrote, and the torn
and mended curtains before the single window. Though she neither
apologised nor showed in her manner the faintest embarrassment, he felt
instinctively that her fierce maidenly pride was putting her to torture.

"I came with a mes