Suppose she should tell Mrs.Ogle." "I can't see that it matters," said Julian, with annoyance.

"I will myself see Mrs.Ogle." "No, no! The idea! I should have to leave at once.

Whatever shall I do if she turns me away, and won't give me a reference or anything!" Even in a calmer mood, Julian's excessive delicacy would have presented an affair of this kind in a grave light to him; at present he was wholly incapable of distinguishing between true and false, or of gauging these fears at their true value.

The mere fact of the girl making so great a matter out of what should have been so easy to explain and have done with, caused an exaggeration of the difficulty in his own mind.

He felt that he ought of course to justify himself before Mrs.Ogle, and would have been capable of doing so had only Harriet taken the same sensible view; but her apparent distress seemed--even to him--so much more like conscious guilt than troubled innocence, that such a task would cost him the acutest suffering.