“Are your labors ended so soon?”

Mr. Avery bowed pluperfectly, and Cally smiled suddenly.  He was a pink, slightly bald young man, and had once been described by Mr. Berkeley Page as very gentlemanly.

“What are you laughing at?” inquired he, somewhat lugubriously.

“Only at something funny Mrs. McVey just said.  You know how witty she is....  Have you handed them all out?”

“I appointed a deputy,” confessed Mr. Avery, “but I labored hard for a time.  Am I not entitled to—­er—­the rewards of labor now?”

Cally glanced away, with no more desire to smile.  The look in his pink eyes had arrested her attention, and she wondered whether she could possibly bring herself to take him.  She was not wanted as a Settlement worker; and he would be colossally wealthy some day.  Perhaps he lacked an indefinable something that comes from grandfathers, but he had never committed a social fault in his life, unless you would hold up against him an incurable fondness for just one tiny little drop of cologne on a pure linen handkerchief.  Mamma would be rather pleased, poor dear.

Then her mind’s eye gave her a flashing memory-picture of Canning, the matchless, and Mr. Avery became unimaginable....

“Such as what?” said she, listlessly, to his roguish hints of reward.

“I should offer my escortage for—­er—­a small tour over the premises, and so forth.  Why not?”

“No reason in the world, except that I may not go over the prem ...”

That word the speaker left forever unfinished.  And her next remark was: 

“What did you say?”

Obviously there was an interlude here; and in it Cally Heth had seen, and recovered from the sudden sight of, the strange young man Mr. V.V., upon whom her eyes had not fallen since a sunny May morning when she had sat and wept before him.  He stood quite near, the founder of the Settlement, though in an obscure corner:  backed there, it seemed, by a fat conversationalist in a purple bonnet.  But there must have been telepathy in Cally’s gaze for her one confidant; for she had no sooner descried his tall figure through the fuss and feathers than he turned his eyes and looked at her.

She had considered with mingled feelings the prospect of meeting this man again to-day; and now the sight of his face and lucid gaze brought something of that sense of shock which had attended these encounters in other days.  Only now, twined with the painfulness of many associations which his look aroused, there was a sort of welcome, odd and unexpected; she felt a little start of gladness, as at the unlooked-for appearance of something trusted and familiar.  How was it that she had thought so little of him in these months, through which it had seemed that there was nobody who understood?...

She bowed, in quite a bright and friendly way, putting down her inward disquiet; and then it was that, turning hastily again to the faithful Avery, Cally inquired: