“I am afraid it does matter.  It makes a mess of everything, and it’s all my fault.  I spoiled things.  I’ve got to go.”

“But you will come back?” she pleaded.

He shook his head.

“It is better not, Madeline.  I’m sorry.”

She snatched her hand away from his, her eyes shooting sparks of anger.

“I hate you, Ted Holiday.  You make me care and then you go away and leave me.  You are cruel—­selfish.  I hate you—­hate you.”

Ted stared down at her, helpless, miserable, ashamed.  No man knows what to do with a scene, especially one which his own folly has precipitated.

“Willis Hubbard is coming down to-morrow night and if you don’t stay as you promised I’ll go to the Swan with him.  He has been teasing me to go for ages and I wouldn’t, but I will now, if you leave me.  I’ll—­I’ll do anything.”

Ted was worried.  He did not like the sound of the girl’s threats though he wasn’t moved from his own purpose.

“Don’t go to the Swan with Hubbard, Madeline.  You mustn’t.”

“Why not?  You took me.”

“I know I did, but that is different,” he finished lamely.

“I don’t see anything very different,” she retorted hotly.

Ted bit his lip.  Remembering his own recent aberration, he did not see as much difference as he would have liked to see himself.

“I suppose you wouldn’t have taken your kind of girl to the Swan,” taunted Madeline.

“No, I—­”

It was a fatal admission.  Ted hadn’t meant to make it so bluntly, but it was out.  The damage was done.

A demon of rage possessed the girl.  Beside herself with anger she sprang to her feet and delivered a stinging blow straight in the boy’s face.  Then, her mood changing, she fell back into the hammock sobbing bitterly.

For a moment Ted was too much astonished by this fish-wife exhibition of temper even to be angry with himself.  Then a hot wave of wrath and shame surged over him.  He put up his hand to his cheek as if to brush away the indignity of the blow.  But he was honest enough to realize that maybe he had deserved the punishment, though not for the reason the girl had dealt it.

Looking down at her in her racked misery, his resentment vanished and an odd impersonal kind of pity for her possessed him instead, though her attraction was gone forever.  He could see the scar on her forehead, and it troubled and reproached him vaguely, seemed a symbol of a deeper wound he had dealt her, though never meaning any harm.  He bent over her, gently.

“Forgive me, Madeline,” he said.  “I am sorry—­sorry for everything.  Goodby.”

In a moment he was gone, past the portulaca and love-lies-bleeding, past Cousin Emma’s unlit parlor windows, down the walk between the tiger lilies and peonies, out into the street.  And Madeline, suddenly realizing that she was alone, rushed after him, calling his name softly into the dark.  But only the echo of his firm, buoyant young feet came back to her straining ears.  She fled back to the garden and, throwing herself, face down, on the dew drenched grass, surrendered to a passion of tearless grief.