"Cora, Cora," he whispered hoarsely, "you're not doing this for the party! It's not for the party! It's for me, Cora, for me--" "Such a nice party--party--" A fragment of Milicent's treble good nights drifted in from the sidewalk like an echo. CHAPTER VI Shelby waked from a restless night to confront a restless day, in truth, an anxious week. Two things he set about instanter; he wrote a manly letter of apology to Ruth, and he returned Mrs. Hilliard's money. All day long he parried and laughed down fatuous comment on his supposed cropper into the canal, for the cob had returned to his manger and founded a theory that his master let gossip accept as true. He dissembled with greater ease as the hours lapsed, finding reasons why the inner history of the incident would remain secret; neither Ruth nor Bernard Graves was likely to tell--he certainly should not. In the evening it was bruited that Graves was sick, and the morrow's _Whig_ diagnosed his malady as influenza. Shelby thanked his practical stars that the ducking had had no such issue for him. By the second evening he was doubly thankful, for the press despatches were ticking out to whom it might concern that the distinguished author of the ode on the "Victory of Samothrace" and other poems lay low with pneumonia. In common with hundreds, Shelby sent a message of regret, which, like its fellow-hundreds, nobody at the Graves cottage found time to read. Many of these notes and telegrams, however, found their way into the _Whig_, but Shelby hunted its despised columns in vain for his own. This seemed to him and to Bowers a deliberate attempt by Sprague to stamp him as unfeeling,--to coin party capital,--and with the notion of righting himself in the public eye Shelby determined upon a personal call at the house. By a piece of good fortune, as unexpected as it was welcome, he was received by Ruth, who had volunteered to lighten the burden of the sick man's mother in ways like this. She was unembarrassed, courteous, even kind in a formal fashion, telling him in subdued accents what he knew she must know he knew already from the newspapers. The patient's case discussed from every point of view, the caller burned to forward his own concerns, to renew his apologies, to make his peace; but he could find no opening, and shortly went away. Yet his silence did him better service than speech. Ruth mistook his unrest for contrition, and pitied him.