nd their hope of freedom; and the misty pictures in her mind
were not of herself--for well she had felt her weaknesses this day--but
rather they were of a dim emerging ideal, of herself as she might some
day hope to be. Vague aspirations were moving in her; new reachings of
the spirit; dreams that spoke with strange voices....

And, companied by these ethereal fancies, she came, before she was aware
of it, to the substantial steps of Home, where began the snuggest of all
snug grooves....

She arrived with the intention, already well formed, of retiring
forthwith to her room, and--probably--spending the whole evening there.
But here, as it chanced, interruption fell across her thought. Just at
her own door, Cally almost ran into a man who was standing still upon
the sidewalk, as if waiting for some one: a tall old gentleman standing
and leaning upon his cane. Cally came out of her absorption just in time
to escape collision.

"I beg your pardon!..." she began, with manner, stepping back.

But then her feet faltered, and her voice died suddenly away, as she saw
that this silent old man was her neighbor, Colonel John B. Dalhousie,
whom she had never spoken to in her life.

The Colonel was regarding her with frightening fixity. The girl's
descent from the empyrean to reality had the stunning suddenness of a
fall: she showed it in her blanching face. Now, as the two thus stood,
the old man raised a hand and swept off his military hat in a bow of
elaborate courtesy.

"An apology from Miss Heth," said he, in a purring voice, "is the last
thing on earth one of my name would have ventured to expect."

Doubtless the meeting had been obliged to come some day: Cally had often
thought of it with dread, once escaped it by a narrow margin. That it
should have come now, in the gentler afterglow of this curiously
disturbing day, seemed like the grimness of destiny.... No fear of
over-generosity here; no gleam in these eyes of brave and beautiful
things....

"But you ask my pardon," the smooth-cutting voice went on. "It is
granted, of course, my dear. You took my son's heart, and broke it, but
that's a bauble. You took his honor, and I kicked him out, but honor's a
name in a printed book. You took his life, and I buried him, but sons,
we know, cannot live forever. What is there here to make a father's
heart grow hard?"

Cally raised her hand to her throat. She felt suffocating, or else a
little faint. From life she seemed to h