"I didn't think she should be treated like a dog!" Phil drew away, with her head held high, her fists tightly clenched. Kirkwood walked slowly across the room thrice while she stood immovable. He recalled her presence in a moment and remarked absently:-- "Amzi should have told me. It wasn't fair for him to do this. If I had known last night that she was here--" He broke off with a groan. The resigned, indifferent air he had lately flung off possessed him again, and seeing it the pity stole back into her heart. She moved about, avoiding him, fearful of meeting again that hurt, wounded look in his eyes. The short day was drawing to an end, and the shadows deepened. He was mechanically lighting his pipe, and she crouched in her favorite seat by the fire. "It's a little tough, Phil," he said finally with a revival of courage, pausing in his slow, aimless wandering through the rooms. "It's a little tough after so long, and _now_." She could not controvert this; she merely waited to see what further he had to say. He paused presently, his arm on the mantel-shelf, his fingers nervously playing with his pipe. "What is she like, Phil?" "Oh, she is lovely! She is the most charming woman that ever lived!" "You liked her, then; she was nice to you?" "She is dear and sweet and wonderful! Oh, I didn't know she would be like that!" His eyes opened and shut quickly. There was an implied accusation against him in the fervor of her admiration for the wife who had deserted him. He groped for something in self-justification with which to confute Lois Montgomery's daughter. "You found her what you would like your mother to be,--you didn't think her hard or cruel?" "No." "You wouldn't have thought her a woman who would desert a husband and a helpless baby and run away with another man?" There was silence in the room. He had mercilessly condensed the case against Lois Montgomery, reducing it to its harshest terms for Phil's contemplation. It was in Phil's mind that she had nothing to do with those things; that the woman against whose cheek she had laid her own was not Thomas Kirkwood's recreant wife, but another and very different person. She did not know how to express this; it seemed preposterous to insist to her father that his former wife was not the same woman that she had held speech with that day. "I can't talk about her in that way, daddy. I can't tell you just how I feel. But it seemed so wonderful, when I went into the house, and those horrible creatures were circling round her like wolves, that we understood each other, she and I, without a word being said! And I hated them all, except dear old Amy. They all went home and Amy went off and left us alone, and we talked just as though we had been old friends." She ceased as though to attempt to describe it would be profanation. "What did she say--about me?" he asked blindly.