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 "I didn't see you at the hotel."

"No, ma'am. I didn't feel like goin' to the ho-tel, somehow, Miss Louise."

"Oh, please don't 'Miss Louise' and 'ma'am' me, Tom. You know me too well for that."

"Yes, lambie," said Tom.

He got hold of her hand, and held it in the light, openly and boldly, as something that belonged to him.

"Tom, you kept away from the hotel because you didn't want to see me."

She didn't believe it, but it is a woman's way to lay charges, especially a guilty woman when she contrives to make a case against the one in whose censure she soon is to stand. It is a poor subterfuge of filing a cross-bill, of which the best of women are guilty in their shifty little lives.

"I had doubts and fears," said Tom, in his simple, honest way. "But I know they were foolish. I know it as well as anything, now."

"But you don't know what a great wrong I did you, Tom."

She looked up at him with that pleading, large-eyed appeal, as she used to look at hard-hearted citizens who would not buy the Thousand Ways; as she had leaned that first day in McPacken to look at Banjo Gibson, and quicken his sophisticated heart.

"You never wronged a butterfly in your life, you poor little dove," he said.

"But I did—I did something that was simply aw-