Dick put his hands to his head. They’d done it again. Again. Well, this time she meant it. But to go without a caress---- He went towards her. “Can’t I kiss you once before I go?” And because she yearned for it, she taunted him. “Your kisses aren’t love,” she said bitterly. “They’re desire!” Ellen, returning with the children from the walk, found that Cecily was shut in with the baby. When she finally came from her room she was dressed to go out. “Mr. Warner will be here any moment,” she said. “I’ll dress Dorothea. Put that white dress with the yellow embroidery on Leslie. Don’t forget to lock up the house when you go out, will you? And Ellen, don’t say anything to any one about Mr. Harrison’s having been here. He won’t be here again.” “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Ellen irrepressibly. Dorothea, hearing her mother’s sentence, had set up a howl, and Leslie joined her for company. “My father is gone again,” wailed Dorothea with spirit, making comedy out of tragedy, until Ellen, contrary to all discipline, presented her with an irrelevant chocolate cream which distracted her temporarily. Ellen did not say anything more, but she kept her eyes on Cecily’s drooping figure and Cecily smiled at her rather pathetically. “I suppose it’s all my fault, Ellen. Something’s gone wrong with the world and I’m tangled up in the machinery.” Ellen never spoke in metaphors. “It’s not what should be with a loving couple like you and Mr. Harrison.” There came to Mr. Warner’s house a few hours later an A. D. T. messenger, weighted with an immense box of flowers. In the depths of the layers of roses, so fragrant and cool, was Dick’s note. “Cecily dear, I had no right to come, no right surely when I had come, to hurt you so. Please try to forget it and me; and if you can’t quite do that think of me as having a heart full of gratitude and respect and affection which expresses itself badly, but as best it can. To-morrow I want to send the children some Christmas things. Please let me do that, and if there’s any way I can help you--anything you will let me do for you--it will make me happy. Merry Christmas! Dick.” He wrote that, after many drafts of its wording, sitting in his room at the club, and he hunted all over the city for flowers, finding some at length in a hotel flower-shop. If Cecily could have seen him as he wrote, his big hand thoughtfully penning the words, his face drawn and set, she would have known that it was not she alone who was humiliated and outraged by the turn of things. When he had sent the flowers he wrote other letters, one of them to Matthew, telling him that he contemplated going at once into the mining towns. * * * * *