“I was afraid our talking might disturb my aunt,” she said, and on her way back to him she picked up the photograph case and brought it to the light.  “These are my father and mother.  We live at Yonkers; but I’m with my aunt a good deal of the time in town—­even when I’m at home.”  She laughed at her own contradictory statement, and put the case back without explaining the third figure—­a figure in uniform.  Dan conjectured a military brother, or from her indifference perhaps a militia brother, and then forgot about him.  But the partial Yonkers residence accounted for traits of unconventionality in Miss Anderson which he had not been able to reconcile with the notion of an exclusively New York breeding.  He felt the relief, the sympathy, the certainty of intelligence which every person whose life has been partly spent in the country feels at finding that a suspected cockney has also had the outlook into nature and simplicity.

On the Yonkers basis they became more intimate, more personal, and Dan told her about Ponkwasset Falls and his mother and sisters; he told her about his father, and she said she should like to see his father; she thought he must be like her father.

All at once, and for no reason that he could think of afterward, except, perhaps, the desire to see the case with her eyes, he began to tell her of his affair with Alice, and how and why it was broken off; he told the whole truth in regard to that, and did not spare himself.

She listened without once speaking, but without apparent surprise at the confidence, though she may have felt surprised.  At times she looked as if her thoughts were away from what he was saying.

He ended with, “I’m sure I don’t know why I’ve told you all this.  But I wanted you to know about me.  The worst.”

Miss Anderson said, looking down, “I always thought she was a very conscientious giyl.”  Then after a pause, in which she seemed to be overcoming an embarrassment in being obliged to speak of another in such a conviction, “I think she was very moybid.  She was like ever so many New England giyls that I’ve met.  They seem to want some excuse for suffering; and they must suffer even if it’s through somebody else.  I don’t know; they’re romantic, New England giyls are; they have too many ideals.”

Dan felt a balm in this; he too had noticed a superfluity of ideals in Alice, he had borne the burden of realising some of them; they all seemed to relate in objectionable degree to his perfectionation.  So he said gloomily, “She was very good.  And I was to blame.”

“Oh yes!” said Miss Anderson, catching her breath in a queer way; “she seyved you right.”

She rose abruptly, as if she heard her aunt speak, and Dan perceived that he had been making a long call.

He went away dazed and dissatisfied; he knew now that he ought not to have told Miss Anderson about his affair, unless he meant more by his confidence than he really did—­unless he meant to follow it up.