"No! No, I wasn't--I swear! I must go at once," said Charles. Unaware of the painful memories her womanly words evoked, Miss Grace naturally looked very much surprised. "But--_what's_ the matter? Why, you act as if it were something improper for you to look at my ring!" "Absurd," said the tutor, with a gesture. He had merely remembered, all of a sudden, something very important he had to do, that was all. Pardon his haste, but he had already stayed too long, he feared. Indifferent to Miss Grace's bewilderment, he left at once, wondering if voluntary celibacy could not exist, and be respected, upon this earth. And next day, as he stood on the corner of Center Street awaiting his good, safe street-car--indeed, as he was in the very act of boarding the said safe car--the little Fordette chugged up behind and nipped him. It was a pure accident, and he knew it. But he saw at once that no accident could well have been less opportune. It involved a discovery highly prejudicial to his future. Angela, indeed, had not even seen Mr. Garrott. She had merely perceived, rounding the corner into her own street, that she was about to run over somebody, and had awkwardly clapped on her brake, just in time. Recognizing her friend in the person she had so nearly bumped, she gave a little feminine cry of mirth and excitement; and, while she apologized and laughed over the strange coincidence, Charles's car, of course, suddenly clanged away and left him. The rest followed, as the night the day. Almost the first thing she said was: "Oh, is _this_ where you take the street-cars, when you haven't time to walk?" Charles's reply indicated that he was very erratic and uncertain in these matters, taking the cars now at one point, now again in a totally different quarter of the city. So the two friends, no longer constrained by misunderstanding, started off on the slow mile drive to Berringer's. In the course of this drive, Charles had his first justifying thought of Mary Wing in ten days. He recognized, with deep misgivings, that this girl's attitude toward him was wholly ingenuous and natural, the "claim" he complained of but the spontaneous expression of her girlish conception of their relations. That, of course, was just the worst of it; in that naïveté (oh, surely this was the Naïve Sex!) was her soft strength. He, with his cursed weak politeness, knew not how to withstand her maidenly theory; she, on the other hand, had new means of putting it forward constantly. All was changed, he saw now clearly, from the instant when she came riding back into his life at the wheel of the ancient Fordette. How was he to have any privacy of movement henceforward; how get from place to place? Beside him, the girl was talking, with simple pleasure, of bridge. It appeared that she was thinking of having another party next week, in honor of Cousin Mary. Mr. Tilletts was very anxious to improve his game, she mentioned.