her work.

"I didn' know you was goin' away."

"That's absurd: you knew all along I was going away," she returned,
with countenance as expressionless as feminine subtlety could make it.

"W'y don't you let somebody else do that? Can't you come out yere a
w'ile?"

"No, I prefer doing it myself; and I don't care to go out."

What could he do? what could he say? There were no convenient depths
in his mind from which he might draw at will, apt and telling speeches
to taunt her with. His heart was swelling and choking him, at sight of
the eyes that looked anywhere, but in his own; at sight of the lips
that he had one time kissed, pressed into an icy silence. She went on
with her task of packing, unmoved. He stood a while longer, silently
watching her, his hat in his hands that were clasped behind him, and a
stupor of grief holding him vise-like. Then he walked away. He felt
somewhat as he remembered to have felt oftentimes as a boy, when ill
and suffering, his mother would put him to bed and send him a cup of
bouillon perhaps, and a little negro to sit beside him. It seemed very
cruel to him now that some one should not do something for him--that
he should be left to suffer this way. He walked across the lawn over
to the cottage, where he saw Fanny pacing slowly up and down the
porch.

She saw him approach and stood in a patch of sunlight to wait for him.
He really had nothing to say to her as he stood grasping two of the
balustrades and looking up at her. He wanted somebody to talk to him
about Melicent.

"Did you know Miss Melicent was goin' away?"

Had it been Hosmer or Therese asking her the question she would have
replied simply "yes," but to Gregoire she said "yes; thank Goodness,"
as frankly as though she had been speaking to Belle Worthington. "I
don't see what's kept her down here all this time, anyway."

"You don't like her?" he asked, stupefied at the strange possibility
of any one not loving Melicent to distraction.

"No. You wouldn't either, if you knew her as well as I do. If she
likes a person she goes on like a lunatic over them as long as it
lasts; then good-bye John! she'll throw them aside as she would an old
dress."

"Oh, I believe she thinks a heap of Aunt Therese."

"All right; you'll see how much she thinks of Aunt Therese. And the
people she's been engaged to! There ain't a worse flirt in the city of
St. Louis; and always some excuse or other to break it off at the last
minute. I haven