month that unless he forswears sack and lives cleanly she will
visit him with her high displeasure. Meanwhile, most of these
satellites have affaires de coeur of their own, some respectable,
others not; they regard the young lady with engaging frankness as
a woman and a sister, they have the run of her father's house, and
would feel insulted if anybody questioned the perfect correctness
of their behaviour. Each man has, say, half a dozen houses where
he is welcomed on the same understanding. Of course, when one
particular young man and one particular young woman read lunatic
things in each other's eyes, then the rest of the respective
quasi-sisters and quasi-brothers have to go hang. (In parenthesis,
I may state that the sisters are more ruthlessly sacrificed than
the brothers.) At any rate, frankness is the saving quality of the
modern note.

In the case of Althea, there had been no sign of such
specialisation. She could not have gone forth, poor child, to meet
the twenty with whom she was known to be on terms of careless
comradeship. She had gone from her home, driven by God knows what
impulse, to walk in the starlight--there was no moon--along the
banks of the canal. In the darkness, had she missed her footing
and stepped into nothingness and the black water? The Coroner's
Jury decided the question in the affirmative. They brought in a
verdict of death by misadventure. And up to the date on which I
begin this little Chronicle of Wellingsford, namely that of the
summons to Wellings Park, when I heard of the death of young
Oswald Fenimore, that is all I knew of the matter.

Throughout July my friends were like dead people. There was
nothing that could be said to them by way of consolation. The sun