Meantime the little lady and her companion had sat down, and in that crowded place they were talking as eagerly and unconsciously as if they had been all alone in the Garden of Eden. "I hate an ostrich," remarked Lydia. "Her husband doesn't see her, anyway," said Felicia lightly; but there was an edge of bitterness in her voice; and again I wondered if through all our meaningless talk Felicia was signalling to me in a cipher code of her own invention. "Perhaps he does see just the same, perhaps he cares, and can't find the words to tell her in," I ventured. "She may," Felicia speculated, "be keeping on and on, just waiting for the word from him. She may not be able to stop all by herself--she may have no way of stopping herself." The corners of her mouth drooped. I felt she had told me all--everything that had saddened her, all the things she had tried to say and couldn't. For few of us can stop all of ourselves, there must be some warning voice to call "halt" to each of us, and I had been leaving it to Monty Saunders' first impertinence. Now I had to tell her I was unable to do anything else. "He may have tried and tried to tell her and found that he couldn't. He may have found he was constitutionally unable to interfere," I told her. "It seems so easy to me," Felicia murmured, "to say 'I'm jealous'--just two little words like that----" And the dull other fellow inside me had kept me awake nights inventing long-winded lectures for me, when all I needed to say was two little words. But a groan burst from him, and he made me say it. "But, O Felicia," my unwilling lips repeated, "those two words are the hardest words in the whole language." For by the light of Felicia's words I had found him out, the hypocrite. He had been jealous all along. Felicia looked at me with curiosity. "I suppose they would be hard words to say if one really felt them," she said comprehendingly. "But I'm not jealous!" I longed to shout, but before we could say anything further, Monty Saunders and a girl danced past us. "So you brought it off?" said Lydia, looking after the receding pair. "How did you know?" Felicia demanded. "He told her," explained little Cecilia Bennett, "when Lydia asked him how you could stand him around so much, he told her you were helping him out with Mildred--telling him what to do and keeping his courage up. He told me, too," pursued Cecilia, with the importance one naturally feels when one is in the thick of the battle of life. "He says it's awful to see a proposal before you, and the only way really is to stumble on it before you know you've made up your mind." "Poor boy," remarked Lydia. "I should find Mildred formidable myself. Six feet and muscle!" "Poor boy!" Felicia exclaimed resentfully. "Poor tattle-tale, going around telling everybody when he made me promise not to tell a soul. That's the last time I keep a secret."