When Archibald returned to the city his malaria compelled him to go away again almost immediately to Newport. There, a few weeks later, his agent wrote him that he had succeeded in renting the house “at an exorbitant figure to a very rich tenant without children”—thus fulfilling his mother’s conditions to the letter. He went back to the city, recovered in health, to pack up a few personal effects, and found to his surprise that Miss Perkins and her niece were, at the moment he arrived, in the house. They had taken board on Ninth Street, and had gone up to take a last look of the charming interior where, Elvira guiltily acknowledged, life had been “so wrongly pleasant.” He found Elvira holding a fan in her hand and seated pensively in an old Venetian chair in what was formerly her studio. As he entered the room she rose, blushing a most vivid red, and as rapidly turning pale again. “Mr. Archibald!” she exclaimed. “I did not know you were in the city!” “I have been here only an hour,” he said, stiffly. “It is time for us to go;” and she turned to the door. “Elvira!” His face looked sick and ghastly. “Well?” She drew herself up very coldly. “Are you made of stone?” “Mr. Archibald, what can you mean?” “My child, you are capable of grinding one who loves you into powder—like—er—a millstone!” “Aunt Perkins!” she called out, “let us go!” “No,” he cried, “I will not let you go. You shall hear me! I love you! Do you hear? And you shall not leave this house until you say you will be my wife! I know you care for me—everything tells me so—but you will wear your own and my heart out with your hard, cruel conscience! What brought you here? _You loved me!_ Why have you been sitting in this room? You love me, Elvira—I know it—I feel it!” Gently he drew her to him and kissed her. She laid her head on his shoulder and breathed a little contented sigh. “_I don’t think this—is right!_” she said. MRS. MANSTEY’S VIEW BY EDITH WHARTON