She began, resolutely; added up one column, and subtracted the total from another; said: "Gosh! I'm out thirty dollars!" nibbled the end of her pen, and reflected that she would have to work on her father's sympathies;--then, suddenly, her pen still in her hand, she sat motionless. "Even if there _was_ anything--bad, I'd forgive him. He's a lamb!" But as she spoke, childishness fell away--she was a deeply distressed woman. Maurice was suffering. And she knew, in spite of her assertions to the contrary, that it wasn't because of any slight thing; any "crush" on a girl--nice or otherwise! He was suffering because he had done wrong--and she couldn't tear downstairs and say: "Maurice, never mind! I love you just as much; I don't care what you've done!" Why couldn't she say that? Why couldn't she go now, and sit on the porch steps beside him, and say--anything? She got up and began to walk about the room; her heart was beating smotheringly. "Why shouldn't I tell him I love him so that I'd forgive--_anything_? He knows I've always loved him!--next to father and mother. Why can't I tell him so, now?" Then something in her breast, beating like wings, made her know why she couldn't tell him! "I love him; that's why." After a while she said: "There's nothing wrong in it. I have a right to love him! He'll never know. How funny that I never knew--until to-night! Yet I've felt this way for ever so long. I think since that time at Fern Hill, when he was so bothered and wouldn't tell me what was the matter." Yes; it was strange that now, when some stabbing instinct had made her know that Maurice was not her "perfec' gentil knight," that same instinct should make her know that she loved him!... Not with the old love; not with the love that could overflow into words, the love that had kissed him when he had been "bothered"! "I can never kiss him again," she thought. She did not love him, now, "next to father and mother--dear darlings!" And when she said that, Edith knew that the "darlings" were of her past. "I love them next to Maurice," she thought, smiling faintly. "Well, he will never know it! Nobody will ever know it.... I'll just keep on loving him as long as I live." She had no doubt about that; and she did not drop into the self-consciousness of saying, "I am wronging Eleanor." That, to Edith, would not have been sense. She knew that she was not "wronging" anyone. As for the unknown girl, who, perhaps, had "wronged" Eleanor, and about whom, now, Maurice was so ashamed and so repentant--she was of no consequence anyhow. "Of course she is bad," Edith thought, "and the whole thing was her fault!" But it was in the past; he had said so. "He said it was long ago. If," she thought, "he did run crooked, why, I'm sorry for poor Eleanor; and he ought to tell her; there's no question about _that_! It's wrong not to tell her. And of course he couldn't tell me. That wouldn't be square to Eleanor!... But I hate to have him so unhappy.... No; it's right for him