The occasion might have come sooner than she expected; but alas!  Fate was unkind.  Keith was not conscious until he found that Lois Huntington had left town how much he had thought of her.  Her absence appeared suddenly to have emptied the city.  By the time he had reached his room he had determined to follow her home.  That rift of sunshine which had entered his life should not be shut out again.  He sat down and wrote to her:  a friendly letter, expressing warmly his pleasure at having met her, picturing jocularly his disappointment at having failed to find her.  He made a single allusion to the Terpsichore episode.  He had done what he could, he said, to soothe his friend’s ruffled feelings; but, though he thought he had some influence with her, he could not boast of having had much success in this.  In the light in which Lois read this letter, the allusion to the dancing-girl outweighed all the rest, and though her heart had given a leap when she first saw that she had a letter from Keith, when she laid it down her feeling had changed.  She would show him that she was not a mere country chit to be treated as he had treated her.  His “friend” indeed!

When Keith, to his surprise, received no reply to his letter, he wrote again more briefly, asking if his former letter had been received; but this shared the fate of the first.

Meantime Lois had gone off to visit a friend.  Her mind was not quite as easy as it should have been.  She felt that if she had it to go over, she would do just the same thing; but she began to fancy excuses for Keith.  She even hunted up the letters he had written her as a boy.

It is probable that Lois’s failure to write did more to raise her in Keith’s estimation and fix her image in his mind than anything else she could have done.  Keith knew that something untoward had taken place, but what it was he could not conceive.  At least, however, it proved to him that Lois Huntington was different from some of the young women he had met of late.  So he sat down and wrote to Miss Brooke, saying that he was going abroad on a matter of importance, and asking leave to run down and spend Sunday with them before he left.  Miss Brooke’s reply nearly took his breath away.  She not only refused his request, but intimated that there was a good reason why his former letters had not been acknowledged and why he would not be received by her.

It was rather incoherent, but it had something to do with “inexplicable conduct.”  On this Keith wrote Miss Brooke, requesting a more explicit charge and demanding an opportunity to defend himself.  Still he received no reply; and, angry that he had written, he took no further steps about it.

By the time Lois reached home she had determined to answer his letter.  She would write him a severe reply.

Miss Abby, however, announced to Lois, the day of her return, that Mr. Keith had written asking her permission to come down and see them.  The blood sprang into Lois’s face, and if Miss Abby had had on her spectacles at that moment, she must have read the tale it told.