What did she imagine had transpired between Mrs.McKinstry and himself?
Had she confidently expected her mother's prompt acceptance of the situation and a reconciliation?
Was that the reason why she had treated that interruption as lightly as if she were already his recognized betrothed?
Had she even calculated upon it?
had she--?
He stopped, his cheek glowing from irritation under the suspicion, and shame at the disloyalty of entertaining it.
Opening his desk, he began to arrange his papers mechanically, when he discovered, with a slight feeling of annoyance, that he had placed Cressy's bouquet--now dried and withered--in the same pigeon-hole with the mysterious letters with which he had so often communed in former days.

He at once separated them with a half bitter smile, yet after a moment's hesitation, and with his old sense of attempting to revive a forgotten association, he tried to re-peruse them.

But they did not even restrain his straying thoughts, nor prevent him from detecting a singular occurrence.

The nearly level sun was, after its old fashion, already hanging the shadowed tassels of the pine boughs like a garland on the wall.

But the shadow seemed to have suddenly grown larger and more compact, and he turned, with a quick consciousness of some interposing figure at the pane.