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“Now, what am I to say to her, Mrs. Daly? Am I to make a clean breast of it, and let her know the true and peculiar state of the case, including the fact that I’m in love with her myself? Or would you let that wait, and try to smooth things over for Micky, and get her to give him another chance? There was no sign of his moving last night; still, he may get here yet.”

The young man’s spirits seemed to be rising as he neared the end of his tale, perhaps because he could see that it looked pretty black for “Micky.”

“If one could only know what he does mean to do, it would be simpler, wouldn’t it?”

I agreed that it would. Then I made the only suggestion it occurred to me to offer in the case–that he should go to his hotel and get his luncheon or breakfast, for I doubted if he’d had any, and leave me to meet Miss Comyn, and say to her whatever a kind Providence might inspire me with. My husband would call for him and fetch him up to dinner, I said; and after dinner, if Mr. Michael Harshaw had not arrived, or sent some satisfactory message, he could cast himself into the breach.

“And I’m sorry for you,” I said; “for I don’t think you will have an easy time of it.”

“She can’t do worse than hate me, Mrs. Daly; and that’s better than sending me friendly little messages in her letters to Micky.”

I wish I could give you this story in his own words, or any idea of his extraordinary, joyous naturalness, and his air of preposterous good faith–as if he had done the only thing conceivable in the case. It was as convincing as a scene in comic opera.

“By the way,” said he, “I didn’t encumber myself with much luggage this trip. I have nothing but the clothes I stand in.”

I made a reckless offer of my husband’s evening things, which he as recklessly accepted, not knowing if he could get into them; but I thought he did not look so badly as he was, in his sun-faded corduroys, the whole of him from head to foot as pale as a plaster cast with dust, except his bright blue eyes, which had hard, dark circles around them.

“The train is coming,” I warned him.

” She is coming! A la bonne heure! ” he cried, and was off on a run, and whistled a car that was going up Main Street to the natatorium; and I knew that in ten minutes he would be reveling in the plunge, while I should be making the best of this beautiful crisis of his inventing to Miss Comyn.

* * * * *

My dear, they are the prettiest pair! Providence, no doubt, designed them for each other, if he had not made this unpardonable break. She has a spirit of her own, has Miss Kitty, and if she cried up-stairs alone with me,–tears of anger and mortification, it struck me, rather than of heart-grief,–I will venture she shed no tears before him.

As Mr. Michael Harshaw did not arrive, we gave Mr. Cecil his opportunity, as promised, of speech with his victim and judge. He talked to her in the little sitting-room after dinner–as long as she would listen to him, apparently. We heard her come flying out with a sort of passionate suddenness, as if she had literally run away from his words. But he had followed her, and for an instant I saw them together in the hall. His poor young face was literally burning; perhaps it was only sunburn, but I fancied she had been giving him a metaphorical drubbing–“ragging,” as Tom would call it–worse than Lady Anne gave Richard.