He spoke with such a tender stress upon the word that she felt a great remorse for what she had done to him, though indeed it had been no fault of hers. It is impossible, under the present conditions of society at least, that a young woman should make two young men happy at once; one of them must go to the wall. Perhaps if this one had put himself forward instead of the other matters might have been otherwise; the peach falls to the hand that is readiest. There are men that never win the woman they love till she becomes a widow; for my part, in the meantime—but I am writing of Frank Dennis. He was of a patient disposition, and had a very moderate opinion of himself. And yet his love for Margaret was great, and so genuine that he could have been content to see her happy with another man. Why he was not now content was because he did not think she would be happy; but he did not tell her so, for, though honesty might suggest his doing so, honour forbade him. There is an honour quite different from that of the fanfaronnading sort, one which has nothing to do with running a fellow-creature through for a hasty word, or with ruining some one else to pay our card debts—a delicate, scrupulous sense of what is becoming even in our relations with our enemies, a flower of a modest colour which grows in the shade. This was the sort of honour that Frank Dennis possessed, and which prompted him now to keep silence, when he might have said something which would have been much to his own advantage. ‘Good-bye, Margaret,’ was all he said, as he took her hand in his. He would, if he could, have even eliminated a certain tenderness from his tone, because he knew it gave her pain; but he could not so utterly conquer nature. ‘Good-bye, Frank,’ was all she said in reply, or dared to say. She was thinking of him and not of herself at all. It was pity for him which made her voice falter and her soul quail within her, lest at that supreme moment he should have demanded from her, once for all, another sort of dismissal. As to love, her heart was loyal to her Willie; and yet, though she would not have confessed it even to herself, she had a secret sense as the door closed upon this other one that she had burned her boats. CHAPTER XXI. A TIFF.