out for honors, and his knuckles had been rapped cruelly. He wanted to
reach out for love--and he dared not. The girl, as she stood there, was
so patently among the things he was not able to possess!

She had come into his presence with expectation keenly alert, with her
fears putting her into a mental posture of defense. She felt that she
knew just what was going to happen, and she was assuring herself that
she would be able to meet the situation. But she was not prepared for
what did happen. She did not understand Britt's mental state of that
moment. Mr. Britt, himself, did not understand. He had never been up
against conditions of that sort. He had not had time to fix his face and
his mood, as he did daily before the mirror in his bedroom. He did what
nobody had ever seen him do--what neither he nor the girl would have
predicted one minute before as among human probabilities--he broke down
and blubbered like a whipped urchin.

And after he had recovered some of his composure and was gazing up at
her again, sniffling and scrubbing his reddened eyes with the bulge
at the base of his thumb, knowing that he must say something by way
of legitimate excuse, dreading the ridicule that a girl's gossip might
bring upon him, a notion that was characteristic of Mr. Britt came
to him: he grimly weighed the idea of telling her that Files's boiled
dinner was the cause of his breakdown. However, in his weakness, his
love flamed more hotly than ever before.

"Vona, I'm so lonesome!" he gulped.

Miss Harnden had entered behind her shield, nerved like a battling
Amazon. She promptly lowered that shield and became all woman, with a
woman's instinctive sympathetic understanding, but womanlike, she took