"What do you mean?" Her eyes were a little wide.

"H'm...."

"Tell me, Les. We can't go on this way." She meant that she would find it uncomfortable—a cloud for her present satisfaction with life.

"You knew how I felt. You knew all about it. Yet you didn't send me packing, or try to drop me. You didn't even give me a hint of how things were. Do you call that sparing a fellow?"

His arraignment was almost bewildering in its complexity. But she chose one indictment and grappled with it valiantly. "Of course I didn't try to drop you. I never treated any man that way!"

"Well," he replied dryly, "I wish you had."

"You wish I hadn't had anything to do with you?" Such a proposition struck her as unpleasant, to a marked degree—even almost grotesque.

He countered without replying: "Didn't you know how much I cared?"

"Yes, but my goodness, Les, must a girl entirely shun a man to prevent his falling—I mean, to keep him from caring too much?"

"Oh, no," he answered with a sharp sigh. "Don't mind me. Don't mind anything I've said. I guess[Pg 40] I'll get over it—especially since it seems that you didn't feel at all the way I did, and I was merely making a fool of myself." It was a cup of highly flavoured bitterness.

[Pg 40]

"Oh, please don't say such a thing as that! You know I told you all along, Leslie, that I—that I had a friend in Arizona, and I—well, you see I somehow felt you'd understand. I didn't know the things we did—I mean I didn't realize our being together so much meant anything except that we—well, that we liked each other and wanted to be together...."

She felt it was just a little lame, and began laying about for more forcible expression. Meanwhile, Leslie muttered: "No, those things never do mean any more, I guess."

"But Leslie, dear—"

She spoke unwisely. At the familiar word of affection, which had thrilled him so often during the unmolested weeks—that wonderful span shattered by the arrival of the letter from Arizona—Leslie momentarily forgot about his dark humiliation. He forgot everything but the fact of the woman beside him. He seized her swinging hand; gripped 

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