“Then you will compel me to be disagreeable; and I don’t like to be that. I always have plenty of work to do in the evenings; quite a number of the young women would like to take extra music lessons, and I have a piano in my rooms.” Tregarvon gasped. “You don’t mean that you’d be hard-hearted enough to shut yourself up? to refuse to see me? That would be--but I simply can’t contemplate it. You--you don’t know what your confidence and your clear insight have come to mean to me!” “On the contrary, it is because I do know, or rather because I know how you are justifying yourself, that you must----” “But I shall not! It is just a frank, open friendship that has grown very precious to me, Richardia. Put it upon the lowest possible grounds; say that it amuses you and doesn’t hurt Elizabeth--I could show you letters from her in which she actually encourages it--and add to these that it does me a whole lot of good. Why should you freeze up right in the midst of it, just when I am needing all the encouragement I can get?” Miss Birrell did not wish to laugh, but his protest, the shocked pleading of a little boy who fears he is about to be deprived of his customary piece of bread and butter with sugar on it, was too much for her self-control. None the less, she would not yield a hair’s-breadth. “You can’t convince me, and you needn’t try,” she declared. “Granting what you say--that it amuses me and doesn’t hurt any one else--there are still the conventions to be considered. Perhaps you think, because you are a thousand miles from Philadelphia, that there are no conventions. If you do, you are greatly mistaken. Highmount, for example, has a complete equipment of them.” “Confound the conventions!” growled Tregarvon. Carfax was leading his following back to the car, and the end of the confidential talk was approaching. “No, you needn’t swear at them,” said Miss Richardia, with honey in her tone. “More than that, you would be the last person in the world to want to have them confounded. In your proper environment, I can picture you as an exceedingly correct person; one who would protest most vigorously if his sister should----” She did not finish, because the others were within hearing distance; but the sentence was sufficiently complete to point the comparison for Tregarvon. He bent over the steering-wheel and pretended to be trying the connections of the substitute battery coil. The feint permitted him to say in low tones: “You are altogether right--as you always are. I’ll be as decent as I can: and it will cost more than you think.” After which he descended from the driving-seat and shifted the responsibility of the return of the party to Highmount over to Carfax, saying that since the drill was doubtless nearing the coal depth, he would better stay on the job.