"I don't know what I do mean," said Rose, nervously. "Yes, I do know what I mean. I always know what I mean, but I don't know what men mean making me drop candy I have had given me, and trampling on it, and men don't know that I know what I mean." Rose was almost crying. "Go up-stairs and lay down a little while before dinner," said Sylvia, anxiously. "No," replied Rose; "I am going to help you. Don't, please, think I am crying because I feel badly. It is because I am angry. I am going to set the table." But Rose did not set the table. She forgot all about it when she had entered the south room and found Henry Whitman sitting there with the Sunday paper. She sat down opposite and looked at him with her clear, blue, childlike eyes. She had come to call him Uncle Henry. "Uncle Henry?" said she, interrogatively, and waited. Henry looked across at her and smiled with the somewhat abashed tenderness which he always felt for this girl, whose environment had been so very different from his and his wife's. "Well?" he said. "Uncle Henry, do you think a man can tell another man's reasons for doing a queer thing better than a woman can?" "Perhaps." "I almost know a woman could tell why a woman did a queer thing, better than a man could," said Rose, reflectively. She hesitated a little. Henry waited, his worn, pleasant face staring at her over a vividly colored page of the paper. "Suppose," said Rose, "another woman had given Aunt Sylvia a box of candy which she had made herself, real nice candy, and suppose the woman who had given it to her was lovely, and you had knocked a piece of candy from Aunt Sylvia's mouth just as she was going to taste it, and had startled her so you made her drop the whole box, and then set your heel hard on the pieces; what would you have done it for?" The girl's face wore an expression of the keenest inquiry. Henry looked at her, wrinkling his forehead. "If another woman had given Sylvia a box of candy she had made, and I knocked a piece from her hand just as she was going to taste it, and made her drop the whole box, and had trampled all the rest of the candy underfoot, what should I have done it for?" he repeated. "Yes." Henry looked at her. He heard a door shut up-stairs. "I shouldn't have done it," he said. "But suppose you had done it?" "I shouldn't have." Rose shrugged her shoulders. "You are horrid, Uncle Henry," she said. "But I shouldn't have done it," repeated Henry. He heard Horace's step on the stair. Rose got up and ran out of the room by another door from that which Horace entered. Horace sat down in the chair which Rose had just vacated. He looked pale and worried. The eyes of the two men met. Henry's eyes asked a question. Horace answered it. "I am in such a devil of a mess as never man was yet, I believe," he said. Henry nodded gravely. "The worst of it is I can't tell a living mortal," Horace said, in a whisper. "I am afraid even to think it."