e she wanted to catch a
train. I believed, too, that the editorial was written after our--our
talk. I'm sorry."

Hal stood above her, looking rather stern, and a little old and worn,
she thought.

"If that is an apology, it is accepted," he said with surface
politeness.

To him she was, in that moment, a light-minded woman apologizing for the
petty misdeed, and paying no heed to the graver wrong that she had done
him. Jeannette Willard could have set him right in a word; could have
shown him what the girl felt, unavowedly to herself but with underlying
conviction, that for so great an offense no apology could suffice;
nothing short of complete surrender. But Mrs. Willard was not there to
help out. She was waiting hopefully, outside.

"And that is all?" he said, after a pause, with just a shade of contempt
in his voice.

"All," she said lightly, "unless you choose to tell me how the 'Clarion'
is getting on."

"As well as could be expected. We pay high for our principles. But thus
far we've held to them. You should read the paper."

"I do."

"To expect your approval would be too much, I suppose."

"No. In many ways I like it. In fact, I think I'll renew my
subscription."

It was innocently said, without thought of the old playful bargain
between them, which had terminated with the mailing of the withered
arbutus. But to Hal it seemed merely a brazen essay in coquetry; an
attempt to reconstitute the former relation, for her amusement.

"The subscription lists are closed, on the old terms," he said crisply.

"Oh, you couldn't have thought I meant that!" she whispered; but he was
already halfway down the room, on the echo of his "Good-afternoon, Miss
Elliot."

As before, he turned at the door. And he carried with him, to muse over
in the depths of his outraged heart once more, the mystery of that still
and desperate smile. Any woman could have solved it for him. Any,
except, possibly, Esme Elliot.

"It didn't come out as I hoped, Festus," said the sorrowful little Mrs.
Willard to her husband that evening. "I don't know that Hal will ever
believe in her again. How can he be so--so stupidly unforgiving!"

"Always the man's fault, of course," said her big husband comfortably.

"No. She's to blame. But it's the fault of men in general that Norrie is
what she is; the men of this town, I mean. No man has ever been a man
with Norrie Elliot."

"What have they been?"

"Mice. It's a tradition of the place. The