s to recall him.

"Have you really given each other up?" she asked.

"Yes," said Peter, in the same glad acquiescence. "And what do you think
she told me, the last thing of all?"

She shook her head.

"She told me I loved you. And I do, Rose. Oh, I do! I do!"

"But that mustn't part you. Think what it is to me--to know my coming
here has done it."

"Oh, you had to come!" said Peter light-heartedly. "It was preordained.
It's destiny. I was a fool not to see it the first minute. She had to
tell me."

Rose, in spite of herself, smiled a little. But her thoughts settled
gravely back upon her own hard task.

"Did she tell you"--She hesitated, and then asked her question with a
simple directness. "Did she tell you how much mistaken you are in me?"

"Please don't," said Peter. His face flushed. He looked his misery.

"You see she is the only one who was not mistaken in me. Those of you
who believed in me--well, I must tell all of you. Even grannie, dear
grannie! I am afraid--" She stopped because she meant to show no
emotion; but it seemed to her that grannie, in her guarded life, must
view her harshly. "I was wrong, Peter, ever to let you mix yourself in
this miserable coil. If I could lie, well and good. Let me do it and
take the consequences. But I should have known better than to bring you
into it."

Peter stood thoughtfully regarding her in a very impersonal way, as if
he debated how she could be moved.

"I wonder," he said at last, "how it is possible to tell you how lovely
you are to everybody, how perfectly splendid, you know, quite different
from anybody else! And when you add to that that you've been wronged
and--and insulted--oh you've simply no conception how it makes a fellow
feel! Why, I adore you, that's all. I just adore you."

He stretched out his hand like a bluff comrade and she put hers into it
as frankly.

"You're a dear boy, Peter," she said, and her eyes were wet.

He spoke perversely, when she had taken her hand away:--

"That's all very well, you know, but I'm not a boy--not all the time. I
love you awfully, Rose, in the real way, the bang-up old style, Tristan
and all that, you know. I'm going to keep on and you'll have to listen."

"Shall I, Peter?" She was still smiling wistfully. Love, sweet, clean,
young love looked very beautiful to her. She wished she could see it
crowning some head, not hers, some girl quite worthy of him. "Well, not
to-day."

"No, maybe not to-day," Pete