Ellen was churning in her cool, quiet buttery. She greeted Diantha coldly, then bade her bring a chair for herself from the kitchen. "No, I will stand," answered Dian, too excited yet to talk calmly. "I have had such a fright!" And she proceeded to relate her recent experiences, not adding to nor taking from one single point; the truth was brutal enough to this sheltered, pure-minded, unsophisticated girl. With that awful truth she had come to warn and shield her dearest friend. Ellen listened with her brooding eyes fixed upon her frothing churn-dash. When the story was fairly told, she offered no word of comment. "What do you think of that?" asked Dian, anxious to obtain her friend's point of view. "I don't think anything," Ellen said, at last. "Why, Ellie, he was dead drunk." "How could you tell such a thing as that?" asked Ellen, judicially. "What do you or I know about drunken men?" "Oh, his eyes, and his red face--and--and--everything--" stammered Diantha, confused to be thus put at a disadvantage, and upon the witness-stand. "And there was something so terrible about him every way that I just shuddered when he looked into my eyes." Still Ellen refused to discuss the matter. Dian persisted: "You can't think what a fright I was in. If you could have just seen him--" The sullen listener busied herself with her churn. And at last, she sat down to work over her butter. "Ellie," coaxed Diantha, "what do you think about the thing, anyway?" The weak, delicate character of the love-sick Ellen had been turned from its own natural candid sweetness into the gall of secretive obstinacy, by her concealed passion; and when she was thus adjured, she simply raised her dash to clean off the remaining globes of gold, as she said, tartly: "If you want to know what I think about you, Dianthy Winthrop, I'll tell you--'sour grapes'!" Diantha was too frankly surprised for a moment to do aught but stare stupidly at the lowered face opposite her. Then suddenly comprehending, she said icily, her lips drawing into a sharp line across her face: "Do you think I have made up all this story? That I am jealous? Jealous of a vile, wicked soldier? Oh, Ellen, you surely can't think such a terrible thing as that!" "Would it be the first time you've been jealous of me?" asked the girl. Dian's truthful memory received this home-thrust in silence; but she was not thus to be thrown from her purpose. "But, Ellen, he was drunk! Drunk, I tell you! And he is not fit to wipe your shoes on." "Sour grapes," muttered the scornful lips of the girl before her.