instinctive way had resented it, though her actual indictment against
Wallace in those days had always been that he made her naughty; incited
her by his perpetual assumption that she was the angelic little creature
she looked, to one desperate misdemeanor after another, for which her
father usually punished her. Mary had, superficially anyhow, her mother's
looks along with her father's temper.

But for two years after Mrs. Wollaston's death, she and Wallace had been
very good friends. She was grateful to him for treating her like a
grown-up, for talking to her, as he often did, about her mother and how
much she had meant to him. (She owed it, indeed, largely to Wallace that
her memories of this sentimental, romantic, passionless lady with whom in
life she had never been completely in sympathy, were as sweet and
satisfactory as they were.) He had taken infinite pains with her, guiding
her reading and her enjoyment of pictures in the paths of good taste. He
took her to concerts sometimes, too, though at this point her docility
ceased. She wouldn't be musical for anybody. He gave her much-needed
advice in dealing with social matters which her sudden prematurity
forced her to cope with. And with all this went a placidity which had no
part at all in her relations with her father.

She got the idea, during this period, that he meant, when she was a
little older, to ask her to marry him, and she sometimes speculated
whether, if he did, she would. There would be something beautifully
appropriate about it;--like the Professor's Love Story. Usually, though,
she terminated the scene with a tender refusal.

She had long known, of course, how unreal all this was. Wallace had faded
into complete invisibility at the time when she fell in love with Captain
Burch and quarreled with her father about him. She couldn't remember