When Marguerite, about eleven o’clock, approached the library a little fearfully, she saw Barbee pacing to and fro on the sidewalk before the steps.  She felt inclined to turn back; he was the last person she cared to meet this morning.  Play with him had suddenly ended as a picnic in a spring grove is interrupted by a tempest.

“I ought to tell him at once,” she said; and she went forward.

He came to meet her—­with a countenance dissatisfied and reproachful.  It struck her that his thin large ears looked yellowish instead of red and that his freckles had apparently spread and thickened.  She asked herself why she had never before realized how boyish he was.

“Marguerite,” he said at once, as though the matter were to be taken firmly in hand, “you treated me shabbily the night of your party.  It was unworthy of you.  And I will not stand it.  You ought not be such a child!”

Her breath was taken away.  She blanched and her eyes dilated as she looked at him:  the lash of words had never been laid on her.

“Are you calling me to account?” she asked.  “Then I shall call you to an account.  When you came up to speak to grandmother and to mamma and me, you spoke to us as though you were an indifferent suitor of mine—­as though I were a suitor of yours.  As soon as you were gone, mamma said to me:  ’What have you been doing, Marguerite, that he should think you are in love with him—­that he should treat us as though we all wished to catch him?’”

“That was a mistake of your mother’s.  But after what had passed between us—­”

“No matter what had passed between us, I do not think that a man would virtually tell a girl’s mother on her:  a boy might.”

He grew ashen; and he took his hand out of his pockets and straightened himself from his slouchy lounging posture, and stood before her, his head in the air on his long neck like a young stag affronted and enraged.

“It is true, I have sometimes been too much like a boy with you,” he said.  “Have you made it possible for me to be anything else?”

“Then I’ll make it possible for you now:  to begin, I am too old to be called to account for my actions—­except by those who have the right.”

“You mean, that I have no right—­after what has passed—­”

“Nothing has passed between us!”

“Marguerite,” he said, “do you mean that you do not love me?”

“Can you not see?”

She was standing on the steps above him.  The many-fluted parasol with its long silken fringes rested on one shoulder.  Her face in the dazzling sunlight, under her hat, had lost its gayety.  Her eyes rested upon his with perfect quietness.

“I do not believe that you yourself know whether you love me,” he said, laughing pitifully.  His big mouth twitched and his love had come back into his eyes quickly enough.