t.... Don't you know _now_
that I love you? I love you so that I won't live without you."

Yes, Cally did know it now. She had clearly wronged both Hugo and
herself in ever thinking of him as a male flirt, a light-loving jilt who
too easily found balm for a heart not made for deep hurts. Busy and gay
with her dressing, Carlisle thought of the Honorable Kitty Belden, and
laughed musically to herself.

Yet how was it that, under so manly and sweet an appeal straight to her
woman's heart, she had not instantly subsided on the shoulder of her
contrite lover, with grateful tears? Cally herself hardly understood.
She was, truth to tell, secretly surprised and thrilled by her own
high-handedness. To what degree she and her former betrothed had remet
under permanently changed conditions, it was beyond her thought to try
to analyse now. Perhaps it was only the completeness of her triumph that
had so fired her feminine independence. Had she met Hugo by chance, and
found him lukewarm, doubt not that she would have striven to fan the
embers....

She had followed her intuitions, which never reason, and when she said
that she was now disciplining her prodigal, she spoke out her actual
feelings as far as she herself understood them; feelings, they were,
which had a deep root far back in all the summer's unhappiness. There
was a sentence of Hugo's last May: _"I asked one girl to be my wife;
have you the right to offer me another?"_ She would make Hugo pay a
little more for that remark, now that she could just as easily as not.

Like Aaron's rod, the return of Canning had swallowed up all other facts
of the girl's existence, or nearly all. She was lifted, as on wings, out
of the slough of her despond. Nevertheless, the news heard at the
Settlement recurred even now; and when Mrs. Heth appeared in the
bedroom, just after eight, Carlisle greeted her with:

"Has papa gone out, mamma?"

Mamma said no, papa was in the study, though Mr. MacQueen was with him
just at the moment. Something about installing some new machines at the
Works, she believed....

"That will do, Flora--Miss Carlisle has everything she needs...." And
then the good lady said, with a smile so knowing as to amount to a
tremendous wink: "You are going to tell your father to-night.... That's
right, my dear--"

Cally gave a burst of gay laughter, declaring that there was not one
earthly thing to tell.

"Of course, darling, mamma understands," said that lady, promptl