“Your plan,” he said, simply. “You don’t think you can lay out a man like that—a man that every other girl in the place is ready to fight you for—you don’t think you can do it in such a way as to make you the _only_ girl who has a _chance_ to see him, and then spend all your time with him, and day after day send him so many bushels of flowers that the florist himself gasps over it—and read to him hour after hour, and drive _more_ hours with him—you can’t do all that and expect people not to _see_ it, can you?” Lily’s high colour was vanishing, pallor taking its place. “You needn’t believe I don’t hate you because I stop telling you so for a moment,” she said. “But there’s a mystery somewhere, and I’ve got to get at it. What do you mean I mustn’t expect people not to see?” “Why, the truth about how he got hurt.” Lily stepped back from him. “Henry Burnett,” she said, “Henry Burnett, do you dare——” Henry interrupted her. He had come to apologize; but what he believed to be her hypocrisy was too much for him. “I don’t see the use of your pretending,” he said. “The whole population knows you did it on purpose.” “Did _what_ on purpose?” “Hit him in the head with your golf ball on purpose!” Lily uttered a loud cry and clasped her hands to her breast. Aghast, she stared at him with incredulous great eyes; but even as she stared, her mind’s eye renewed before itself some painful pictures that had mystified her—the spitefully uproarious girls in the park; her friend, Emma; the buzzing “tea”; the group at the gate as she came out;—and there were other puzzles that explained themselves in the dreadful light now shed upon them. Uttering further outcries, she sank into a chair. “Slander!” she gasped. “Oh, a _horrible_ slander!” “What?” Henry cried again. “When everybody knows the things you can do with a golf ball if you care to? When that professional trick-player gave his exhibition here, knocking five balls into five hats in a row, and all that, how many of his shots didn’t you duplicate after you’d practised them? And some of the girls talked to the caddy McArdle had with him when it happened, and the boy said he didn’t think you were over forty yards away when you hit him. Lily, there isn’t a soul that knows you who’ll ever believe you didn’t do exactly what you planned to do. I don’t mean they think you could do it every time, or that they’re all certain you aimed at his head; but they all believe you tried to hit him—and succeeded!” “And _you_ do?” she said. “_You_ believe it?” He laughed bitterly. “Lily, it’s clear as daylight, and I knew it when I looked up and saw you with him to-day. I knew you’d won what you were after. It was in his face.” Lily gulped and smiled a wry smile. “I see,” she said. “It all works out, and nobody’ll ever believe I didn’t plan it. Yes, I think he proposed to me on the way home this afternoon.”