"I don't know," he said slowly. "We'll have to ... talk things over. Today has changed everything.... If you don't mind, I'll shut the door: people all the time passing through the hall...." She shook her head slightly to indicate a mild degree of impatience with his punctiliousness about that blessed door. Unconscious of this, having closed it, he returned to her, frowning a little as he reviewed her circumstances with a mind that seemed suddenly to have lost its customary efficiency of grasp. He found her eyes and lost them again, glancing aside in inexplicable embarrassment. "I'm sorry," he said slowly, looking down at the manuscript she had just delivered, and abstractedly disarranging it with thin, long fingers--"awfully sorry about the way things have turned out. I--" She interrupted him sharply: "O no, you're not!" He looked up quickly, amazed and disconcerted by the hint of anger in her tone. A little tremor ran through her body and she lifted her chin a trace higher while she met his stare with eyes hot and shining. Red spots like signals blazed in her either cheek. Confused, he stammered: "I beg your pardon--!" "I say you're not sorry. You're glad. You're glad, just like anybody else might be. _I_ don't blame you." She shot these words at him like bullets, with a disturbing display of passionate resentment. He opened his lips to speak, and thinking better of it, or else not thinking at all in his astonishment, gaped witlessly, wholly incapable of conceiving what had got into the girl. With a flush of scornful satisfaction her eyes remarked these evidences, so easily to be misinterpreted; then quickly she lowered her head and turned away, leaning against the table, her back to the light and face in shadow. "_I_ don't blame you," she repeated in a sullen murmur. He demanded blankly: "My dear girl, what _do_ you mean?" "I mean.... Why, just that you're glad to get rid of me!" she returned, looking away. He noticed the nervous strength with which her hands closed over the edge of the table, the whitening of their small knuckles.... "It's perfectly natural, I guess. I've been a nuisance so long, you've got every right to be tired of having me hang around--" "But, my dear young woman--!" She interrupted impatiently: "Oh, don't call me that. It don't mean anything. I guess I know when I'm not wanted. I'll go now and never bother you any more." Moving a pace or two away, she resumed before Matthias could muster faculties to cope with this emergency: "All the same, I don't want you to think I don't appreciate how good you've been to me--and patient, and all that. I am grateful--honest'--but I'm not as dumb as you think: I know when I'm in the way, all right!" "But you entirely misunderstand me--" "O no, I don't! You've made yourself plain enough, if you didn't think I had sense enough to see. It don't take _brains_ to see through a man who's only trying to be polite and kind--all the time bored--" "But, Miss Thursday--"