g to be reassuring, "after more
important things had been settled."

"There wouldn't be anything more important--for me."

"Oh, you wouldn't find me an importunate creditor."

"That wouldn't help matters--so long as I owed the debt. After all, we
belong to that old-fashioned, rather narrow-minded class of New England
people to whom debt of any kind is the source of something like anguish.
At least," she corrected herself, "I belong to that class."

It was on his lips to remind her that in her case there could be no
present release from indebtedness, there could only be a change of
creditors; but he decided to express himself more gracefully.

"Wouldn't it be possible," he asked, "to put the boot on the other foot,
and to consider me as the person to whom the favor is shown in being
allowed to do something useful?"

She lifted her chin scornfully. "That would be childish. It would be a
mere quibbling with words."

"But it would be true. It's the way I should take it."

She confronted him with one of her imperious looks. "Why?"

In the monosyllable there was a demand for complete explanation, but he
met it with one of his frank smiles.

"Couldn't you let me keep that as my secret?"

"So that you would be acting in the daylight and we in the dark."

"You might be in the dark, and still have nothing to be afraid of."

She shook her head. "I _should_ be afraid. It was in the dark, according
to the old story, that the antelope escaped a lion by falling into a
hunter's trap."

"Do I look like that kind of a hunter?" He smiled again at the absurdity
of her comparison.

"You can't tell anything from looks--with men. With men a woman has only
one principle to guide her--to keep on the safe side."

"I hope you won't think me uncivil, Miss Guion, if I point out that, at
present, you haven't got a safe side to keep on. That's what I want to
offer you."

"I might ask you why again, only that we should be going round in a
circle. Since you don't mean to tell me, I must go without knowing; but
I'm sure you can understand that to some natures the lion is less to be
feared than the hunter."

"_He_ doesn't feel so." He nodded his head in the direction of Tory
Hill.

"_He_ feels so. He's only a little--wavering."

"And I guess you're a little wavering, too, Miss Guion, if you'd only
own up to it."

He watched her straighten her slight figure while her delicate features
hardened to an expression of severity. "I'm