"_Anything_--for fear you should have to say it in the same way someone else had said it before!" "Said what?" "Anything! Sit still! Now _I'm_ going to tell _you_." She came slowly round the table and knelt on one knee beside him, her elbows on the arm of his chair. "You've never had the courage to make up your mind to anything," she began. "Is that what you were going to tell me?" he asked, and looked in her eyes till she dropped their lids. "No--yes--no! I haven't anything to tell you really. Good night." "Aren't you going to tell me?" "There isn't anything to tell," she said. "Then I'll tell you," said he. She started up, and the little brass knocker's urgent summons resounded through the bungalow. "Here she is!" she cried. He also sprang to his feet. "And we haven't told each other anything!" he said. "Haven't we? Ah, no--don't! Let me go! There--she's knocking again. You must let me go!" He let her slip through his arms. At the door she paused to flash a soft, queer smile at him. "It _was_ I who told you, after all!" she said. "Aren't you glad? Because that wasn't a bit literary." "You didn't. I told you," he retorted. "Not you!" she said scornfully. "That would have been too obvious." THE LIE ABSOLUTE THE tradesmen's books, orderly spread, lay on the rose-wood writing-table, each adorned by its own just pile of gold and silver coin. The books at the White House were paid weekly, and paid in cash. It had always been so. The brown holland blinds were lowered half-way. The lace curtains almost met across the windows. Thus, while, without, July blazed on lawns and paths and borders, in this room a cool twilight reigned. A leisured quiet, an ordered ease, reigned there too, as they had done for every day of Dorothea's thirty-five years. The White House was one of those to which no change comes. None but Death, and Death, however he may have wrung the heart or stunted the soul of the living, had been powerless to change outward seemings. Dorothea had worn a black dress for a while, and she best knew what tears she had wept and for what long months the light of life had gone out of all things. But the tears had not blinded her eyes to the need of a mirror-polish on the old mahogany furniture, and all through those months there had been, at least, the light of duty. The house must be kept as her dead mother had kept it. The three prim maids and the gardener had been "in the family" since Dorothea was a girl of twenty--a girl with hopes and dreams and fond imaginings that, spreading bright wings, wandered over a world far other than this dainty, delicate, self-improving, coldly charitable, unchanging existence. Well, the dreams and the hopes and the fond imaginings had come home to roost. He who had set them flying had gone away: he had gone to see the world. He had not come back. He was seeing it still; and all that was left of a girl's first romance was in certain