I don't know _one thing_. It makes me so ashamed. They think
I'm not your best friend any more."

Cally observed that all that was too absurd. For the rest, she seemed
somewhat evasive.

"I feel, dearie," said Mats, "that I _ought_ to know what concerns your
life's happiness. You don't know how anxious I've been about you while
you were sick...." If there seemed a tiny scratch in that, the next
remark was more like a purr: "People say that he did something perfectly
terrible, and you threw him over."

"Well, Mats, you know people always get things exactly wrong."

"Then you didn't?" demanded her best friend, with a purely feminine
gleam.

And Cally, ardently wishing to be free of this subject, said gaily that
Mr. Canning had thrown _her_ over--the second time, too! So she had told
him that she had _some_ spirit, that some day he would do that once
too often....

"Oh, you're joking," said Mats, quite pettishly. "Dear, I _don't_ care
for jokes."

And then, as she gazed, not without envy, at her friend's profile, so
strangely sweet and gay, she exclaimed suddenly in a shocked tone: "I
believe you really did do it!"

"Whisper it not in Gath," said Cally, with shining calm....

It was a belief, so mamma had cried in the midnight, which nobody
outside of institutions for the feeble-minded would ever hold. But Cally
was struck only with Mattie's enormous seriousness. Self-reproach filled
her for the interval that seemed to lie between them....

"Mats, you know I've never kept secrets from you. I'll tell you
everything you want to hear about it, from beginning to end.
Only--not to-day."

The kaleidoscope shifted: Mattie faded out of the purview, and in her
stead sat the Misses Winton, who had helped to pass the time in Europe
last year, but whose presence had a contrary effect to-day. And she
wondered how they could not see for themselves what a shell of a hostess
they were talking at. All her being was so far away from company: one
half of her continually flowing back over the months; the rest always
going forward to the afternoon, and beyond; nothing at all left here....

Certainly she would tease him a little about the neat way he and papa
had dropped her out of the Works. "_And I thought I was the one who was
doing it, too_!..."

Callers gone; and then mamma, in the vein of dignity, was inviting her
opinion about the color scheme of her luncheon-table. And with what an
uprush of affection she responded, wha