Her warning came too late. Already several sentences had penetrated into the next room, and a quick knock at the door was followed by the entrance of Lloyd, looking as red and excited as Mary. "Tell me what it was, Mary," she demanded. "What made Bernice act so? I was sure you knew from the way you looked when you joined us." Mary was almost in tears as she repeated what she had told Joyce, for she could see that the Little Colonel's temper was rising to white heat. "And Bernice said it wasn't the first time you had treated her so. She said that Malcolm MacIntyre was so attentive to her last summer while you were away at the Springs; that he sent her flowers and candy and took her driving, and was like her very shadow until you came home. Then he dropped her like a hot potato, and you monopolized him so that you succeeded in keeping him away from her altogether." "Malcolm!" gasped Lloyd. "Malcolm was my especial friend long befoah I evah heard of Bernice Howe! Why, at the very first Valentine pahty I evah went to, he gave me the little silvah arrow he won in the archery contest, for me to remembah him by. I've got it on this very minute." She put her hand up to the little silver pin that fastened the lace of her surplice collar. "Malcolm _always has_ called himself my devoted knight, and he--" She paused. There were some things she could not repeat; that scene on the churchyard stile the winter day they went for Christmas greens, when he had begged her for a talisman, and his low-spoken reply, "I'll be whatever you want me to be, Lloyd." There were other times, too, of which she could not speak. The night of the tableaux was the last one, when she had strolled down the moonlighted paths with him at The Beeches, and he had insisted that it was the "glad morrow" by his calendar, and time for her Sir Feal to tell her many things, especially as he was going away for the rest of the summer on a long yachting trip, and somebody else might tell her the same things in his absence. So many years she had taken his devotion as a matter of course, that it provoked her beyond measure to have Bernice insinuate that she had angled for it. Lloyd knew girls who did such things; who delighted in proving that they had a superior power of attraction, and who would not scruple to use all sorts of mean little underhand ways to lessen a man's admiration for some other girl, and appropriate it for themselves. She had even heard some of the girls at school boast of such things. "For pity's sake, Lloyd!" one of them had said, "don't look at me that way. 'All's fair in love and war,' and a girl's title to popularity is based on the number of scalp-locks she takes."