He saw me on the street one day, and then he went and told everybody that I was in Texas because I’d been drummed from home.  Said I went out rowing with a girl and upset her and then swam off for my skin and she was nearly drowned.  I’ve made some good friends here—­or had made them, I’d better say—­and one of them rode out to our place and said I ought to know what Bellows was saying, so I could thrash him before he skipped town.  Oh, what could I say.

Then I saw Miss Taylor just now, she’s the girl from the East I mentioned in the winter, and she asked me had I heard what they were saying.  I wanted to lie to her, and she’d have believed me if I had, but you couldn’t lie to her, and so I said straight out I was crazy drunk at the time and didn’t know what I was doing, but I guessed most of it was true.  She cares a lot about those things, and I think she’d been crying.  God help me.  So now everything’s changed here; it reminds me of home the way people look at me.  Miss Taylor was the worst, she’s been so fine to me.  She said come to see her in two or three days, when she’d had time to think, and if she casts me off, I can’t stand it here any longer, and I don’t see how I can begin all over again, just when life was seeming as if it might be worth while again.

So now, you see, V.V., why I wasn’t prompter answering your letter.  I’ve tried to keep my courage up like you advised, but it’s too much for one man to carry.  May you never know the awful feeling that you’re an outcast, not wanted anywhere, is the wish of

     Your unhappy friend, DAL.

     P.S.  How’s father, do you ever see him these days?  Don’t let
     him know any of this.

The girl looked through the rose-flowered curtains down into the sunny street....

Dalhousie had long since become but a shadow and a name to Cally; she had willed it so, and so it had been.  Now, in his own poor scrawl, the ghost of a lover too roughly discarded rose and walked again.  And beneath the cheap writing and the unrestrained self-pity, she seemed to plumb for the first time the depths of the boy’s present misery.  The old story, having struck him down once, had hunted him out and struck him down again.  Where now would he hide?...

The too reminiscent letter had come with the inopportunity of destiny.  A little more pressure and she was done for.

But this was mere mad folly.  To shake it off at once, Cally began to walk about her bedchamber.  Nothing had really happened that had not been true all along.  She wished more than ever that it had all been started differently, but it was too late to consider that now.  She must think of herself, and of Hugo and mamma.  Dalhousie’s friend had done his worst, and she could still withstand it.  Once in New York, once in Europe, and all would be as it had been before....

Nevertheless, she was presently weak enough to open the letter again.  Now her eye fell upon two lines written in the margin at the top of the first page, which she had missed before.  They were in the writing of the envelope, and read: