d a hypothesis not unsatisfying after its kind. He had
come with the hope that she would at last make some generous overture
toward a reconciliation. More direct advances, after her three galling
rebuffs of him, he naturally could not bring himself to make. Yet he had
taken a long journey merely to put himself in her way--perhaps counting
on a chance meeting, more probably expecting that she, hearing of his
presence, would this time extend the sweet olive. The wormwood in it was
that she would have been perfectly willing to extend the olive if she
had only known....

The car, pushing through a mean and shabby neighborhood, offensive to
refined eyes, ears, and nostrils, now turned into a narrow street brisk
with the din of business, but by no means lovely to look upon. Recalling
the Cooney presence, Cally suddenly stirred with the deadly
self-protective instinct of her sex, and directed Hen to cease instantly
all thinking about her and Mr. Canning. She did it, needless to say,
scientifically, by saying with just the plausible degree of interest:

"I meant to ask you--what on _earth_ was the trouble with Hortense, Hen?
I supposed she was a perfect _fixture_ with you, an institution!"

"What's the trouble with all the servants in this town?" cried Hen. "I
tell you, Cally, I don't know what's going to become of us. Why ..."

She launched with zest upon the somewhat unoriginal thesis, and Cally
relapsed into her own thoughts, which were full of rebellion at the
bitter untowardness of her fate....

Much water had flowed under the bridge of sighs since the parting in the
library. Passed long since, it seemed, was that uprush of burning
humiliation; subdued was the betraying flare-up (mamma's favorite word
nowadays)--vanished to thin air like a midsummer madness, delirium's
delusion, hardly possible to understand, much less recapture, now. A day
had hardly passed, after the second rejection of Mr. Canning at her
door, before the thought of whistling him back again flashed luringly
across Carlisle's mind. She repelled the thought, but it recurred, and
she came to dally with it, ably assisted in that direction by mamma.
What had he done to warrant such absurd melodramatics?... More and more
her mind had fastened upon the genuine tenderness, the emotion, the man
had shown in his last moment with her. In love with her without quite
realizing it himself, he had in the moment of parting been swept away by
his feelings, and had ta