After a constrained silence, “I really don’t need anyone to stop here with me,” she said to him, as if she had been thinking of it and not of the situation between them, “but I’ll get Stella Wilmot and her brother.”

“Arden?” said Dory, doubtfully.  “I know he’s all right in some ways, and he has stopped drinking since he got the place at the bank.  But—­”

“If we show we have confidence in him,” replied Adelaide, “I think it will help him.”

“Very well,” said Dory.  “Besides, it isn’t easy to find people of the sort you’d be willing to have, who can leave home and come here.”

Adelaide colored as she smiled.  “Perhaps that was my reason, rather than helping him,” she said.

Dory flushed.  “Oh, I didn’t mean to insinuate that!” he protested, and checked himself from saying more.  In their mood each would search the other’s every word for a hidden thrust, and would find it.

The constraint between them, which thus definitely entered the stage of deep cleavage where there had never been a joining, persisted until the parting.  Since the wedding he had kissed her but once—­on her arrival from Europe.  Then, there was much bustle of greeting from others, and neither had had chance to be self-conscious.  When they were at the station for his departure, it so happened that no one had come with them.  As the porter warned them that the train was about to move, they shook hands and hesitated, blushing and conscious of themselves and of spectators, “Good-by,” stammered Dory, with a dash at her cheek.

“Good-by,” she murmured, making her effort at the same instant.

The result was a confusion of features and hat brims that threw them into a panic, then into laughter, and so made the second attempt easy and successful.  It was a real meeting of the lips.  His arm went round her, her hand pressed tenderly on his shoulder, and he felt a trembling in her form, saw a sudden gleam of light leap into and from her eyes.  And all in that flash the secret of his mistake in managing his love affair burst upon him.

“Good-by, Dory—­dear,” she was murmuring, a note in her voice like the shy answer of a hermit thrush to the call of her mate.

“All aboard!” shouted the conductor, and the wheels began to move.

“Good-by—­good-by,” he stammered, his blood surging through his head.

It came into her mind to say, “I care for you more than I knew.”  But his friend the conductor was thrusting him up the steps of the car.  “I wish I had said it,” thought she, watching the train disappear round the curve.  “I’ll write it.”

But she did not.  When the time came to write, that idea somehow would not fit in with the other things she was setting down.  “I think I do care for him—­as a friend,” she decided.  “If he had only compelled me to find out the state of my own mind!  What a strange man!  I don’t see how he can love me, for he knows me as I am.  Perhaps he really doesn’t;