him. He could only hold the weeping girl in his strong embrace,
soothing her in helpless masculine fashion, awkward, but exactly what
she needed.

"There, John," she cried at last, giving him a tumultuous hug, and
looking up into his face through her tears, "I always told you you were
engaged to a fool, and this is a new proof of it."

"But what in the world," Stanton asked, looking down into her eyes with
mingled fondness and bewilderment, "is it all about? What is the
matter?"

"It is nothing but my foolishness," she answered, leading him back to
the chair from which he had risen. "I was going to show you something
in a paper I am copying, and just in time I remembered that I had
particularly promised not to show it to anybody."

He regarded her curiously.

"But why," he asked, with a certain deliberateness which somehow made
her uneasy, "did you want to show it to me."

"Because--because--"

She could not equivocate, and her innocent soul had had little training
in the arts of evasion.

"Because what?"

Stanton leaned back in his chair, holding her by the shoulders as she