trembled as she answered: "Oh it's nothing. I do this often." She went
slowly into the back room where the maid was. In a few minutes she
returned, apparently as usual. She flitted about uneasily, taking up now
one thing, now another in a purposeless, nervous way.

"I never was in here before," she said. "You've got lots of pretty things.
Whose picture is this?"

"That? Oh, my sister-in-law out in Chicago."

Howard did not then understand why she became so gay, why her eyes danced
with happiness, why as soon as she went into the hall she began to sing and
kept it up in her own room, quieting down only to burst forth again. He did
not even especially note the swift change, the, for her, extraordinary mood
of high spirits. It was about this time that their relations began to
change.

Howard had thought of her, or had thought that he thought of her, only as a
lonely and desolate child, to be taught so far as he was capable of
teaching and she of learning. He was conscious of her extreme youth and of
the impassable gulf of thought and taste between them. He did not take her
feelings into account at all. It never occurred to him that this part of
friend and patron which he was playing was not safe for him, not just and
right toward her.

One night he took her to a ball at the Terrace Garden--a respectable,
amusing affair "under the auspices of the Young-German-American-
Shooting-Society." The next day a reporter for the _Sun_ whom he
knew slightly said to him with a grin he did not like: "Mighty pretty
little girl you're taking about with you, Howard. Where'd you pick her