g herself back and forth as in a fever. "Do pull down the shades,
this afternoon sun is sad enough to make you die; and you have an
expression on your face as if you knew something that I don't know. Say
it, then."

"But I don't know anything," averred Marion whimpering.

"Bah, then go, I don't want to see anybody. Bob can come, but he's the
only one; he can be as naughty as he likes here--that will cheer me
up."

But when Bob came he was not naughty, but embarrassed. Billy in her
excitement was strange and uncanny to him. So Billy sent him away too.

"Go, you're a stupid, tiresome boy."

Bob went, but in the doorway he turned around aggrieved, and remarked,
"I don't understand unhappy love at all."

Now Billy lay there and listened to the sounds that went through the
rooms below her, the voices and the slamming of doors, and she waited.
That was her business now. For he had said so, poor injured, insulted
Boris. When she thought of the wrong that had been done him, her heart
swelled with impatient desire to do something for him, to show him and
the world in general that she was for him, and him alone. The summer
afternoon droned at the windows, the house grew quiet, and Billy felt
as if in this sleepy hour she were quite alone with her excitement in a
world that would not hear of excitement or of events. So she too kept
still, her eyes raised to the ceiling. It seemed as if she had lain
there an endless time before the sound came at last, the sound for
which she had waited. She sat up. The rumbling of a carriage which
stopped in the courtyard below, voices, the banging of doors, and again
the rumble of the carriage, which grew fainter and fainter, and finally
slowly died away. "He is gone," she groaned, and sank back upon her
pillows. Great tears rolled down her cheeks, but an inward tension had
relaxed. Some one whom we love is riding away and we weep: that is at
least comprehensible, and so she cried herself to sleep.

When Billy awoke, the room was ruddy with the evening light, voices
came up from the garden, she heard the twins laughing, and on the porch
her father was delivering a lecture for the professor's benefit. A
fresh uneasiness about life came over Billy, and she got up to look out
of the window. Yes, there was Lisa walking along in her bright muslin
dress and eagerly haranguing the lieutenant, who walked a little
stiff-legged beside her. Poor thing, thought Billy, she wants her love
affair too. Bu