et me tell you another thing: I'm as
good any day as Alice Van Ostend, and I should despise myself if I
thought myself less; and if it's the millions that make the difference
in the number of your friends--may God keep me poor till I die!" She
spoke with passionate earnestness.

Mrs. Champney smiled to herself; she felt her purpose was accomplished.

"Are you going up to Mrs. Caukins'?" she asked in a matter-of-fact voice
that struck like cold iron on the girl's burning intensity of feeling.

"Yes, I'm going."

"Well, be back by seven."

The girl made no reply. She left the library at once, closing the door
behind her with a force that made the hall ring. Mrs. Champney smiled
again, and proceeded to re-read Alice Van Ostend's letter.

Aileen went out through the kitchen and across the vegetable garden to
the boat house. She cast loose one of the boats in the float, took her
seat and rowed out into the lake--rowed with a strength and swiftness
that accurately gauged her condition of mind. She rounded the peninsula
of The Bow and headed her boat, not to the sheds on the north shore, but
towards the west, to "lily-pad reach". To get away from that woman's
presence, to be alone with herself--that was all she craved at the
moment. The oars caught among the lily-pads; this gave her an excuse for
pulling and wrenching at them. Her anger was still at white heat--not a
particle of color as yet tinged her cheeks--and the physical exertion
necessary to overcome such an obstacle as the long tough stems she felt
to be a relief.

"It isn't true--it isn't true," she said over and over again to herself.
She kept tugging and pulling till by sheer strength she forced the boat
into the shallow water among the tall arrowhead along the margin of the
shore.

She stepped out on the landing stones, drew up the boat, then made her
way across the meadow to the shade of the tall spreading willows. Here
she threw herself down, pressing her face into the cool lush grass, and
relived in thought that early morning hour she had spent alone with him,
only a few weeks ago, on the misty lake among the opening water lilies.

She had been awakened that morning in mid-July by hearing him singing
softly beneath her open window that same song which seven years ago made
such an unaccountable impression on her child's heart. He had often in
jest threatened to repeat the episode of the serenade, but she never
realized that beneath the jest there was an