"I think he's insufferable," was the chilling answer from Joan; "he considers us savages, and treats us as such." "He may consider us fit for the Zoo, if he likes; it won't hurt us," quoth Maggie indifferently. With which Joan expressed neither assent nor dissent, but brushed her hair a little faster. Maitland did not for a moment abandon his fresh resolution. Still he thought he owed it to himself to set the matter right with the young lady before he stiffened anew. As he descended he met her running up two steps at a time. "Miss Joan, I am afraid I vexed you just now," he said, with grave humility. "Will you believe it unintentional--stupid, on my part, and grant me your pardon?" "Oh, dear!" she cried gayly. "We are not used to this here. It is quite King Cophetua and the beggar maid." She dropped him a mock courtesy, and held out her hand in token of amity, when the full signification of what she had said rushed into her mind and flooded her face with crimson. Without another word or look she fled upstairs, and he heard her door bang behind her. Mr. Charles Maitland, after this _rencontre_, went down smiling grimly. In the hall he stood for a moment in deep thought; then sagely shook his head several times at a stuffed fox and joined the party in the drawing room. [Illustration: MR. CHARLES MAITLAND, AFTER THIS RENCONTRE, WENT DOWN SMILING GRIMLY.] The next day and the next passed with surprising quickness, as the latter days of a visit always do. In another forty-eight hours Maitland's would be over. Yet singularly enough his spirits did not rise, as he expected they would, at the near prospect of release. As he closed his bedroom door he had a vision of a pair of gray eyes smiling into his, and his palm seemed still to tingle with the touch of a soft, warm hand. He had kept his resolution well--small credit to him. Joan had seemed to avoid him since her unlucky speech upon the stairs; when she did speak to him her words, or more often her tone, stung him, and he smarted under a sense that she repaid with interest the small account in which he was inclined to hold the family generally. He resented her veiled contempt with strange bitterness, so that Agnes remarked with her usual candor that he and Joan never spoke to one another save to "jangle." Afterward, walking on the lawn, some line about "sweet bells jangled out of tune," ran in his head. The girl was a vixen, he said to himself, yet he tried to imagine how tender and glorious the great gray eyes, that he only knew as cold or saucy or defiant, could be when their depths were stirred by love. But his imagination failing to satisfy even himself, he went to put on his beagling dress in the worst of humors.