"Martha, I will dispense with your services this afternoon. Miss Beatoun is here, and will give me any assistance I may require." So saying, I draw my friend into my room and close my door. "Now, Bebe, what is it?" I ask, pushing her into a lounging-chair, and beginning a vigorous search for my seal-skin jacket. Martha is a good girl the--best of girls--but she can never put anything in the same place twice running. "Oh, it is nothing--nothing," answers Bebe, in a tone almost comical in its disgust. "My pride has had a slight fall--my conceit has been a little lowered--no more. I hate myself" (with a petulant stamp of the foot) "for taking it so much to heart; but I _do_, and that is the fact, and I cannot yet overcome the feeling. If I did not know I must have looked like a foolish culprit all the while, I think I would not so greatly mind; but my color was coming and going in a maddening fashion; and then his tone--so quick--so---" "Chandos's tone, I suppose, you mean? But you forget, dear; I know nothing." "True, of course not. Well, after you left the library that time with Mark, the whole party broke up and dispersed about the house to prepare for this drive, all except myself. I stayed on--unluckily, as it turned out--to finish my novel, until I should be called to lunch. It interested me, and I thought myself sure of solitude for a little time, but in less than three minutes the door was re-opened, and Chandos came in." "Well?" I say, as she makes a long pause. "Unfortunately, it struck me that his coming back so soon again to where he knew I was alone looked, you know, rather particular--as if he wished to say something private to me; and--I had no desire to hear it. "Oh, Bebe?" "Well, believe me or not, as you will, I really, dreaded his saying anything on the--old topic--to such a degree that I rose and made as though I would instantly quit the room. Oh!" cries she, with an irrestrainable blush and movement of the hand, "I wish I had died before I did _that_." "Why, darling?"