manliness for her, though she denied it to herself, had led her on to discover beyond doubt, she became conscience-stricken.  And she confessed to him that she loved Ross Whitney and was engaged to him; and he had taken the disclosure so calmly that she almost thought he, like herself, had been simply flirting.  And yet—­She dimly understood his creed of making the best of the inevitable, and of the ridiculousness of taking oneself too seriously.  “He probably has his own peculiar way of caring for a woman,” she was now reflecting, “just as he has his own peculiar way in every other respect.”

Arthur came, and their mother; and not until long after supper, when her father had been got to bed, did she have the chance to continue the conversation.  As soon as she appeared on the veranda, where Dory and Arthur were smoking, Arthur sauntered away.  She was alone with Dory; but she felt that she had nothing to say to him.  The surge of fury against Ross and Theresa had subsided; also, now that she had seen Theodore Hargrave again, she realized that he was not the sort of man one tries to use for the purpose she had on impulse formed, nor she the sort of woman who, in the deliberateness of the second thought, carries into effect an impulse to such a purpose.

When they had sat there in the moonlight several minutes in silence, she said:  “I find I haven’t anything especial to say to you, after all.”

A wait, then from him:  “I’m sorry.  I had hoped—­” He halted.

“Hoped—­what?”

“Hoped it was off with you and Whitney.”

“Has some one been saying it was?” she asked sharply.

“No.  I thought I felt it when I first saw you.”

“Oh!” she said, enormously relieved.  A pause, then constrainedly, “Your guess was right.”

“And was that why you sent for me?”

The assent of silence.

“You thought perhaps you might—­care for—­me?”

It seemed almost true, with him looking so earnestly and hopefully at her, and in the moonlight—­moonlight that can soften even falsehood until true and false seem gently to merge.  She hesitated to say No.  “I don’t know just what I thought,” she replied.

But her tone jarred on the young man whose nerves were as sensitive as a thermostat.  “You mean, when you saw me again, you felt you really didn’t care,” he said, drawing back so that she could not see his face.

“No,” she replied, earnestly and honestly.  “Not that.”  And then she flung out the truth.  “Ross has engaged himself to Theresa Howland, a girl with a huge big fortune.  And I—­I—­”

“You needn’t say it,” he interrupted, feeling how it was distressing her to confess.  “I understand.”

“I wasn’t altogether—­wicked,” she pleaded.  “I didn’t think of you wholly because I thought you cared for me.  I thought of you chiefly because I feel more at home with you than with anyone else.  It has always seemed to me that you see me exactly as I am, with all the pretenses and meannesses—­yet not unkindly, either.  And, while you’ve made me angry sometimes, when you have refused to be taken in by my best tricks, still it was as one gets angry with—­with oneself.  It simply wouldn’t last.  And, as you see, I tell you anything and everything.”