ing his hand toward a tortuous brass
knocker the door opened and Barbara, carrying a book and pencil in one
hand, while the other held down her hat-brim, tripped across the
doorstep.

The cloud vanished. "Miss Barb--good-morning!"

"O!--Mr.--March." Her manner so lacked both surprise and pleasure that
he colored. He had counted on a sweet Southern handshake, but she kept
hold of the hat-brim, let her dry smile of inquiry fade into a formal
deference, and took comfort in his disconcertion.

"I was just coming," he said, "I--thought you'd let me come back just to
say good-by--but I see you're on your way to a recitation--I--"

Her smile was cruel. "Why, my recitations are not so serious as that,"
she drawled. "Just to say good-by ought not to con-sti-tute any
se-ri-ous de-ten-tion."

John's heart sank like a stone. Scarcely could he believe his senses.
Yet this was she; that new queen of his ambitions whose heavenly
friendship had lifted first love--boy love--from its grave and clad it
in the shining white of humility and abnegation to worship her sweet
dignity, purity, and tenderness, asking for nothing, not even for hope,
in return. This was she who at every new encounter had opened to him a
higher revelation of woman's worth and loveliness than the world had
ever shown him; she to whom he had been writing letters half last night
and all this morning, tearing each to bits before he had finished it
because he could see no life ahead which an unselfish love could ask her
to live, and as he rent the result of each fresh effort hearing the
voice of his father saying to him as in childhood days, "I'd be proud
faw you to have the kitt'n, son, but, you know, she wouldn't suit yo'
dear motheh's high-strung natu'e. You couldn't ever be happy with
anything that was a constant tawment to her, could you?"

These thoughts filled but a moment, and before the lovely presence
confronting him could fully note the depth of his quick distress a wave
of self-condemnation brought what seemed to him the answer of the
riddle: that this was _rightly_ she, the same angelic incarnation of
wisdom and rectitude, as of gentleness and beauty, to whom in
yesterday's sunset hour of surprise and ecstatic yearning he had implied
things so contrary to their "perfect understanding," and who now, not
for herself selfishly, but in the name and defence of all blameless
womanhood, was punishing him for his wild presumption. O but if she
would only accu