ment. He had for a month been seeing Miss Littell
every day before any of us knew that he went to see her at all.
Certainly Anne, unsuspicious by nature, was unprepared for the
revelation.

It took place in the utterly futile, unnecessary way such
revelations always do take place. The two poor innocent dears had
allowed themselves a single indiscretion; they had gone out together,
a few days before Christmas, to buy some small gifts for each other.
They had had an adventure with a beggar, an old man wise enough to
take advantage of the holiday season, and the no less obvious
holiday in the hearts of this pair. He had forced them to listen to
some quaint variant of the old story, and they had between them
given him all the small change they had left--sixty-seven cents, I
think it was.

That evening at dinner Julian, ever so slightly afraid of the long
pause, had told Anne the story as if it had happened to him alone. A
few days afterward the girl, whom she happened to meet somewhere or
other, displaying perhaps a similar nervousness, told the same story.
Even the number of cents agreed.

I spoke a moment ago of the extraordinary power of concealment which
we all possess; but I should have said the negative power to avoid
exciting suspicion. Before that moment, before the finger points at
us, the fool can deceive the sage; and afterward not even the sage
can deceive the veriest fool.

Julian had no desire to lie to his wife. Indeed, he told me he had
felt from the first that she would be his fittest confidante. He
immediately told her everything--a dream rather than a narrative.

Nowhere did Anne show her magnanimity more than in accepting the
rather extravagant financial arrangements which Julian insisted on
making for her. He was not a rich man, and she the better economist
of the two. We knew she saw that in popular esteem Julian would pay
the price of her pride if she refused, and that in this ticklish
moment of his life the least she could do was to let him have the
full credit for his generosity.

"And after all," as she said to me, "young love can afford to go
without a good many things necessary to old age."

It was the nearest I heard her come to a complaint.

As soon as everything was settled she sailed for Florence, where she
had friends and where, she intimated, she meant to spend most of her
time.

I said good-by to her with real emotion, and the phrase I used as to
my wish to serve her was anyth