The girl jerked her arm from Miss Annabel's grasp, her eyes and cheeks blazing. "Anna Baldwin is crazy about him herself!" she cried violently. "And she's made a fool of herself more times than I can tell! And his father is far better than your father ever was, or mine either!" She stopped as some one looked at her in passing. "I shall just do exactly as I please, Aunt Annabel Armstrong," she added determinedly. "It's just like an old maid to be always interfering in other people's affairs!" Miss Annabel turned white with anger. She was proud of her niece, and yet she almost disliked her. Leslie, young and gay and successful, the inheritor of everything for which her aunt had scrimped and striven and hungered all her life and never attained, was a constant source of irritation and discontent to Miss Annabel. Her heart and hopes were as young as Leslie's, and she was forced to find herself pushed aside into the place of age, while this radiant girl walked all unheeding into everything that her girlhood should have been. And this intimation concerning her age and estate was unbearable. She grew intensely quiet. "Leslie," she said, "you may heed me or not as you wish. But if you had eyes in your head, you would see for yourself that that young man doesn't care the snap of his finger for you and all your money. He's madly in love with Helen Murray. He's always hanging about Rosemount!" she added, growing reckless. "He was there only last night. Just look at him now!" The startled eyes of the girl obeyed. Roderick was walking beside Helen Murray, and looking down at her with the joy of her presence shining in his face. He was not schooled in hiding his feelings, and his eyes told his secret so plainly that Leslie Graham could not but read. She said not another word. They had reached a corner and she suddenly left her aunt and walked swiftly homeward alone. She had had a revelation. For a long time she had suspected and feared. Now she knew. In all her gay thoughtless life she had never wanted anything very badly that she had not been able to get. Now, the one thing she wanted most, the thing which had all unconsciously become the supreme desire of her life, she had learned in one flash was already another's. She was as certain of it as though Roderick had proclaimed his feelings from the church pulpit. Her thoughts ran swiftly back over the months of their acquaintance and picked up here and there little items of remembrance that should have shown her earlier the true state of things. She was forced to confess that not once had he shown her any slightest preference, except as her father's daughter. And yet she had refused to look and listen. And then, upon knowledge, came shame and humiliation and rage at finding she had boldly proffered herself and was found undesirable. It was the birth of her woman's heart. The happy, careless girl's heart was dying, and the new life did not come without much anguish of soul.