“Please,” she said, gently, “don’t mind about that.  I liked you better for it.  I like people to say what they think.  I’ve—­”

“Do you?  Then allow me to say that I’m not quite a bitter fool....”

The young man was advancing toward her, throwing out his hands in a quaint sort of gesture which seemed to say that he had had about as much of this as he could stand.

“For surely I don’t think I am—­I don’t think I’m quite so dumb and blind as you must think me....”  His repressed air was breaking up rapidly, and now he flung out with unmistakable feeling:  “Do you suppose I could ever forget what you did last May!  Not if I tried a thousand years!” said Mr. V.V....  “How could I possibly think anything of you, after that, but all that is brave and beautiful?...”

The two stood looking at each other.  Color came into Cally’s cheek; came but soon departed.  The long gold-and-black lashes, which surely had been made for ornaments, fluttered and fell.

Out of the dead silence she said, with some difficulty: 

“It’s very sweet of you to say that.”

Cally moved away from him, toward the door, deeply touched.  She had wanted to hear such words as these, make no doubt of that.  Among all her meetings with this man last year, she had only that May morning to remember without a stinging sense of her inferiority.  And she supposed that he had forgotten....

“You see,” she said, not without an effort, “I have been telling you my troubles, after all....  I—­I’m afraid I’ve kept them waiting for you upstairs.  I must go.”

But she did not leave the parlor at once, even when Hen, hearing the door creak open, cried down that the infirmary was ready....

If Cally felt that she had somehow confessed her weakness to Mr. V.V.—­about the Works, about life—­and been forgiven by him, it seemed that even that did not quite settle it all.  It must have been that one small corner of her mind refused to consider that all this was a closed episode.

She turned, with her hand on the knob.

“Shall you go to that meeting of Mr. Pond’s next Wednesday—­his meeting for workers?  He has asked me to go.”

The young man said that he would be at the meeting; that he hoped to see her there.

Cally hesitated again.  Perhaps she thought of Hugo then; of perhaps the small unreconstructed corner of her mind grew more unrestful.

“I’m not sure that I’ll be able to go,” she said, slowly....  “Dr. Vivian—­is your telephone number still the same—­Meeghan’s Grocery?  I—­I may want to speak to you some time.”

Yes, it was just the same.  Meeghan’s Grocery.

V.V. stood looking at her from the middle of the floor, one hand raised to his hair in his characteristic gesture.  His old-fashioned sort of face wore a faraway look, not so much hopeful now as wistful; a look which had been moving to Cally Heth, even in the days when she had tried to dislike him.  But of this, the young man from the lonely outskirts was not aware; of the nature of his replies he had taken no note.  In his ears whispered the subtlest of all his many voices:  “She’ll never speak to you, once that’s printed.  Tear it up.  You’ve a right to your youth....”