“Certainly not!” cried Clara, in severe self-rebuke. Then she talked of his return for a while as if it might be expected any moment. “In the mean time,” she added, “you must stay here; you're quite right about that, too, but you mustn't stay here alone: he'd be quite as much shocked at that as if he found you gone when he came back. I'm going to ask you to let my friend Miss Strong stay with you; and she must pay her board; and you must let me lend you all the money you need. And, dear,”--Clara dropped her voice to a lower and gentler note,--“you mustn't try to keep this from your friends. You must let Mr. Atherton write to your father; you must let me tell the Hallecks: they'll be hurt if you don't. You needn't be troubled; of _course_ he wandered off in a temporary hallucination, and nobody will think differently.” She adopted the fiction of Bartley's aberration with so much fervor that she even silenced Atherton's injurious theories with it when he came in the evening to learn the result of her intervention. She had forgotten, or she ignored, the facts as he had stated them in the morning; she was now Bartley's valiant champion, as well as the tender protector of Marcia: she was the equal friend of the whole exemplary Hubbard family. Atherton laughed, and she asked what he was laughing at. “Oh,” he answered, “at something Ben Halleck once said: a real woman can make righteousness delicious and virtue piquant.” Clara reflected. “I don't know whether I like that,” she said finally. “No?” said Atherton. “Why not?” She was serving him with an after-dinner cup of tea, which she had brought into the drawing-room, and in putting the second lump of sugar into his saucer she paused again, thoughtfully, holding the little cube in the tongs. She was rather elaborately dressed for so simple an occasion, and her silken train coiled itself far out over the mossy depth of the moquette carpet; the pale blue satin of the furniture, and the delicate white and gold of the decorations, became her wonderfully. “I can't say, exactly. It seems depreciatory, somehow, as a generalization. But a man might say it of the woman he was in love with,” she concluded. “And you wouldn't approve of a man's saying it of the woman his friend was in love with?” pursued Atherton, taking his cup from her. “If they were very close friends.” She did not know why, but she blushed, and then grew a little pale. “I understand what you mean,” he said, “and I shouldn't have liked the speech from another kind of man. But Halleck's innocence characterized it.” He stirred his tea, and then let it stand untasted in his abstraction. “Yes, he is good,” sighed Clara. “If he were not so good, it would be hard to forgive him for disappointing all their hopes in the way he's done.” “It's the best thing he could have done,” said Atherton gravely, even severely.