Yet it was strange, the change in his feelings toward her brought about in the few days that had elapsed since they had parted at Lake Forest. It was so obvious today that they could never have come together. While he had tried to do the things that she approved, he had been hot and restless, and had never, for one moment, had the calm certainty, the exquisite fulness of feeling that he had now--that the other woman had given him without a single outspoken word. If things had gone differently these past months,--no, from his birth and from hers, too,--if every circumstance of society had not conspired to put them apart, who knows! They might have solved a riddle or two together and been happy. But it was all foolish speculation now, and it was well that their differences should be emphasized at this last chance meeting; that she should be hostile to him. He summed the matter up thus, and, as if answering her last remark, said: "_They_, my dear Miss Hitchcock, are wrong, and you are wrong, if we can use pronouns so loosely. But I have come to feel that I had rather be wrong with them than wrong with you. From to-day, when you speak of 'them,' you can include me." And to correct any vagueness in his declaration, he added,-- "I have left Lindsay's shop, and shall never go back." He could feel that she caught her breath, but she said nothing. "I should never be successful in that way, though it wasn't for that reason that I left." "Do you think you can do more for people by putting yourself--away, holding off--" Her voice sank. "That is a subterfuge," Sommers answered hotly, "fit only for clergymen and beggars for charities. I am not sure, anyway, that I want 'to do for' people. I think no fine theories about social service and all that settlement stuff. I want to be a man, and have a man's right to start with the crowd at the scratch, not given a handicap. There are too many handicaps in the crowd I have seen!" Miss Hitchcock pressed her lips together, as if to restrain a hot reply. She had grown white from the fatigue and excitement and heat. They were almost at her father's house, walking along the steaming asphalt of the quiet avenue. A few old trees had been allowed to remain on these blocks, and they drooped over the street, giving a pleasant shade to the broad houses and the little patches of sward. Just around the corner were some rickety wooden tenements, and a street so wretchedly paved that in the great holes where the blocks had rotted out stood pools of filthy, rankly smelling water. "I have merely decided to move around the corner," the young man remarked grimly. Miss Hitchcock's lips trembled. She walked more slowly, and she tried to say something, to make some ill-defined appeal. As she had almost found the words, a carriage approached the Hitchcock house and drew up. Out of it Colonel Hitchcock stepped heavily. His silk hat was crushed, and his clothes were covered with dust.