e
impolite again." She took my arm in the most friendly way. "Come, I will
walk with you. He will not know--he will remain away all night."

Up and down the veranda we paced in the moonlight, she seemingly
forgetting her recent bereavement, cooing and murmuring girl-wise of
every kind of nothing in all Brownville; I silent, consciously awkward
and with something of the feeling of being concerned in an intrigue. It
was a revelation--this most charming and apparently blameless creature
coolly and confessedly deceiving the man for whom a moment before she
had acknowledged and shown the supreme love which finds even death an
acceptable endearment.

"Truly," I thought in my inexperience, "here is something new under the
moon."

And the moon must have smiled.

Before we parted I had exacted a promise that she would walk with me the
next afternoon--before going away forever--to the Old Mill, one of
Brownville's revered antiquities, erected in 1860.

"If he is not about," she added gravely, as I let go the hand she had
given me at parting, and of which, may the good saints forgive me, I
strove vainly to repossess myself when she had said it--so charming, as
the wise Frenchman has pointed out, do we find woman's infidelity when
we are its objects, not its victims. In apportioning his benefactions
that night the Angel of Sleep overlooked me.

The Brownville House dined early, and after dinner the next day Miss
Maynard, who had not been at table, came to me on the veranda, attired
in the demurest of walking costumes, saying not a word. "He" was
evidently "not about." We went slowly up the road that led to the Old
Mill. She was apparently not strong and at times took my arm,
relinquishing it and taking it again rather capriciously, I thought. Her
mood, or rather her succession of moods, was as mutable as skylight in a
rippling sea. She jested as if she had never heard of such a thing as
death, and laughed on the lightest incitement, and directly afterward
would sing a few bars of some grave melody with such tenderness of
expression that I had to turn away my eyes lest she should see the
evidence of her success in art, if art it was, not artlessness, as then
I was compelled to think it. And she said the oddest things in the most
unconventional way, skirting sometimes unfathomable abysms of thought,
where I had hardly the courage to set foot. In short, she was
fascinating in a thousand and fifty different ways, and at every st