“Perhaps he came home late. I wanted to prepare you. It is not so sudden in my thoughts. But I always do things suddenly after years of thinking about them. My father wanted me to do this. He said if I were not careful, money and literary tastes would make me an idle dog. That set of Ruskin in my room I have left for you. You have made my winter here so home-like, so refreshingly ‘humdrum,’ that I don’t know how to thank you. When Roger begged me to come Thanksgiving Day I feared that I would be one too many, but you all took me in so naturally that I feel as if I had grown up in your old house with you and Roger. It’s awfully hard to go, now I’ve come to the point; somehow I hated my ticket as soon as I took it into my hand. But I knew Aunt Hilda and Judith were going to Bensalem, and I cannot be with them there. But—you will write to me?” he asked, pausing in his rush of words. He had vowed that he would not speak of letters, but the unconscious appeal of her attitude, the look that he felt in the eyes that could not lift themselves had given his heart an ache, that, the next instant, he hated her for making him feel. What right had she to hold him so? He was Roger’s friend. He had only been kind, and frank and considerate toward her, and grateful, because she had touched his life with a touch like healing—he was a better fellow than he was last winter; he had told her one confidential Sunday twilight that he almost wanted to be a Christian. “When will you—come back?” she faltered, speaking her uppermost thought. “Oh, I don’t know,” he answered, roughly. “They may keep me there years, if I do well for the paper—or I may study there—Judith and her mother may bring me home—I have promised Aunt Hilda to take Judith for my sister; that is a rousing responsibility for a bachelor like me. I have been near them this winter, which was one of my reasons for coming here. Now I think of it, perhaps it would have been better if I had never come.” “_I think it would._” The slow, impressive words uttered themselves. She heard them as if another voice had spoken them. They told the whole truth, the whole, terrible, sorrowful truth, and he knew it. “Good-bye,” she said, with a flash of defiance. “Good-bye,” he said, not seeing the hand held firmly toward him. “I will not write to you—you have no right to ask it.” “No, I have not,” he answered humbly, “I have no right to anything; not even to ask you to become my wife.” She lifted her proud eyes; her lips framed the words that her tongue refused to speak. “I beg your pardon. I hardly know what I said.” “It is hardly necessary to tell me that.” “And you will not write to me?” “No.” “I am unhappy enough,” he blundered, “I never thought our happy winter would end like this. I did not mean it to end like this.”