“I never saw a girl so absolutely naive about showing her feelings.  She began to droop the minute he left the house, and hasn’t been her natural self since....  Irritable!—­till you can’t say good morning without her snapping your head off.”

“Maybe, it’s the weather,” suggested Mr. Heth, who wore a white flannel suit and fanned himself with a dried palm-leaf.  “And I reckon, too, she’s feeling sorry to leave her old father for such a long time.  Four months—­hio!”

“Cally’s not the girl to get black rings under her eyes for things like that.”

She added presently:  “It’s a pure love-match, which is naturally a gratification to me, who brought the whole thing about.  ’Thank God, Cally, you’ve got a mother,’ I said to her only the other day.  But I do say there’s such a thing as carrying love just a little too far.”

Cally, meantime, while affecting no interest in summer clothes for chairs, kept as closely occupied with her own affairs, social activities and preparations for the brilliant absence, as mamma did with hers.  Much time went, too, to her correspondence with Canning, who wrote her daily fat delightful letters, all breathing ardent anticipation of her approaching visit in his own city.  And back to Canning, she wrote even fatter letters every morning in mamma’s sitting-room, dear letters (he thought them) in which she told him every single thing except what she was really thinking about....

And why shouldn’t she tell Hugo that also?  Once or twice she really came very near doing it.  For as her mind had become released from her first acute apprehensions, it had seemed to insist on turning inward a little; and there grew within her a sense of unhappiness, of loneliness, a feeling of her poor little self against the world.  She longed for some one to explain it all to, to justify herself before; and who more appropriate in this connection than her lover?  That Hugo might have been shocked, and perhaps disgusted, to have the misunderstanding discovered to him by way of the Dalhousies’ megaphone was, indeed, likely; but to have her quietly tell it to him, as it really happened, with the proper stress on circumstances and gossip, would be quite another matter.  She felt almost certain that he would agree with her; it once that it would be a great mistake to rake up all this now, when it had all blown over and Dalhousie was doing so splendidly down in Texas....

However, Cally procrastinated.  And then, Sunday morning in church, as she sat pensively wishing for a confidant, it came upon her somewhat startlingly that she already had one:  Dr. Vivian was her confidant.  Did he not know more about her than anybody else in the world?...