"You were very young," Mrs. Richie said gravely; the emotion
behind his careless words was obvious. They walked along in
silence for several minutes. Then he said, contemptuously:

"She threw me over. Good riddance, of course."

"If she was capable of treating you badly, of course it was well
to have her do so--in time," she agreed; "but I suppose those
things cut deep with a boy," she added gently. She had a maternal
instinct to put out a comforting hand, and say "never mind." Poor
man! because, when he was twenty a girl had jilted him, he was
still, at over forty, defending a sensitive heart by an armor of
surliness. "Won't you come in?" she said, when they reached her
door; she smiled at him, with her pleasant leaf-brown eyes,--eyes
which were less sad, he thought, than when she first came to
Mercer. ("Getting over her husband's death, I suppose," he said
to himself. "Well, she has looked mournful longer than most
widows!")

He followed her into the house silently, and, sitting down on her
little sofa, took a cigar out of his pocket. He began to bite off
the end absently, then remembered to say, "May I smoke?"

The room was cool and full of the fragrance of white lilies. Mr.
Ferguson had planted a whole row of lilies against the southern
wall of Mrs. Richie's garden. "Such things are attractive to
tenants; I find it improves my property," he had explained to
her, when she found him grubbing, unasked, in her back yard. He
looked now, approvingly at the jug of lilies that had replaced