So Phil was not going to return to Oakdale; he did not care for any of his old friends; and this was gratitude. Yet what had he to be grateful for? The debt was all on her side, and the affection, too, for that matter; and the one, she thought, ought to balance the other. "Lelia!" Phil had contrived to elude Bess' fox-like vigilance, and when she was busy with her tea-set, followed Lelia into the garden, to try and find out what it was that had so mightily offended his old playmate. "Well?" she said, shortly. "I've something to give you," Phil began, in a business-like tone--"not to give you, exactly, but to return to you." And he put in her hand the identical little white envelope she had given him at Oakdale the evening before their departure for Florida. It was worn and soiled, and all its former freshness gone; but it contained five crisp ten-dollar notes, every penny of Phil's small earnings since he had been in Mr. Herdic's employ, and "squared accounts between them," as he said, with a satisfied smile. Lelia was in one of her grand, womanly moods, and seemed to put her childhood and childhood's tempers and jealousies away from her as one might an outgrown garment. She looked as she did the day she had urged her uncle to befriend Oakdale's "bad boy," and her hand closed over the envelope in a slow, proud way, as if she hated, yet strangely valued, the few poor bank-notes it held, hoarded, she knew, with so much self-denial and miserly care, that "accounts might be squared between them," and Phil no longer her debtor. "It's all there," he said, after an awkward pause, seeing that she did not seem inclined to take any further notice of it. "Of course it is. Don't I know that?" "But you have not counted it." "No; but haven't you _said_ it was all there, and isn't that enough?" Phil unconsciously drew himself up, and a glad light shone in his eyes. He was proud of her confidence in his word, and prouder still to feel himself not altogether unworthy of her good opinion. "The time we have been here, and all the queer things that have happened to us since we left Oakdale, seems like a dream," he said, presently--"a strange, exciting dream." "Does it?" She looked up at him in undisguised surprise. "It does not seem so to me; it is all real--as real as my life, as the sea, as the earth--but that is because I am a girl, I suppose, and girls are not so forgetful as boys are, so I've heard people say." You would never have thought her a child to look at her as she spoke. Her eyes were so earnest, her voice so grave, her manner so composed and considering. Her fun and prattle with Bess, her little quarrels and tart replies, her generous, happy, winning, self-willed ways, were as if they had never been, and in their place came resignation, reserve, pride and a little--only a little--regret and sorrow. "I have something for you," she said, after another awkward pause--"something that will help you to remember me when I am gone."