She nodded, half-mechanically. "Well, there have been times lately when I've been afraid he'd kill somebody--in this squabble of ours, you know. He has been going armed--which was excusable enough, under the circumstances--and night before last, when we were walking up-town together, I had all I could do to keep him from taking a pot-shot at a fellow who, he thought, was following us. I don't know but I'm taking all sorts of an unfair advantage of him, telling you this behind his back, but----" "No; I'm glad you have told me. Maybe I can help." He put her into the low basket seat, and tucked the dust-robe around her carefully. While he was doing it he looked up into her face and said: "I'd love you awfully hard for what you have done to-day--if you'd let me." It was like her to smile straight into his eyes when she answered him. "When you can say that--in just that way--to the right woman, you'll find a great happiness lying in wait for you, Edward, dear." And then she spoke to the Morgan mare and distance came between. As once before, in the earlier hours of the same day, Miss Grierson took the roundabout way between the Raymer plant and Mereside, making the circuit which took her through the college grounds and brought her out at the head of upper Shawnee Street. The Widow Holcomb was sitting on her front porch, placidly crocheting, when the phaeton drew up at the curb. "Mr. Griswold," said the phaeton's occupant. "May I trouble you to tell him that I'd like to speak to him a moment?" Mrs. Holcomb, friend of the Raymers, the Farnhams, and the Oswalds, and own cousin to the Barrs, was of the perverse minority; and, apart from this, she had her own opinion of a young woman who would wait at the door of a young man's boarding-house and take him off for a night drive to goodness only knew where, and from which he did not return until goodness only knew when. So there was no stitch missed in the crocheting when she said, stiffly: "Mr. Griswold isn't in. He hasn't been home since morning." Miss Grierson drove on, and the most casual observer might have remarked the strained tightening of the lips and the two red spots which came and went in the damask-peach cheeks. But it was not until she had reached Mereside, and had gained the shelter of the deserted library, that speech came. "O pitiful Christ!" she sobbed, dropping into a chair and hiding her face in the crook of her arm; "he's done it at last!--he's trying to hide, and that's what they've been waiting for! _And I don't know where to look!_" But Matthew Broffin, tilting lazily in his chair on the down-town hotel porch, knew very well where to look, and he was watching the one outlet of the hiding-place as an alert, though outwardly disregardful, house-cat watches a mouse's hole. XXXVII THE QUALITY OF MERCY