“But Reginald’s mother died,” said Alitza, in a singularly half-muffled tone, as if she had been long going forward with the story, and now but made an addition. “Then Uncle George (as I called old Grove) sent me to a good school. It was thought by some to be very good of him; but there was much more back of all that, you must know. I was a thin ghost of a girl then; thinner than I have now become, and I had cross-eyes (as people call it), and I was sallow. But little Reg was used to me; so to come to it at once, the summer I was seventeen I came home from school to the old Grove place. There was no one there but one old servant and Reg, who had been suspended from the academy on some charge; so there we were together two months, as good as in a wilderness. “The first thing I knew we were engaged to be married, and then nothing would do for Reg but a drive to Hartford, to the minister’s; but I knew the minister would not marry us if he knew we were both under age. So as quick as he asked how old we were, I said I was eighteen and Reg was twenty-one. And then came the trouble; for truth, of a sort, was always Reg’s strong point. And as we rode away together, married tight enough by the minister, he looked at me with absolute dislike, and wanted to know what I told that story for. “I told him that as he had been teasing me for six weeks to marry him, and as I had at last said I would, some one had got to tell the lie; and as he hated to, I did it for him out of kindness. I felt bad about it myself. And then the minister had looked at us in a queer way; and Ethel, I was such a simple, ignorant little child, that I did not even know then what disagreeable thing the minister might have been thinking, other than that I was telling a lie. And I knew I was, and that made me color up; and that had made Reginald mad. And so the outcome of his haste to tie me to him by that ceremony was that he had called me a liar, and I had told him I hated him. Then I would do nothing other but drive straight to the old home, half frightened to death at what I had done.