By the time he reached New Leeds, he had already made up his mind to write and ask Miss Abby for an invitation to Brookford, and he wrote his father a full account of the girl he had known as a child, over which the old General beamed.

He forgave people toward whom he had hard feelings.  The world was better than he had been accounting it.  He even considered more leniently than he had done Mrs. Wentworth’s allowing Ferdy Wickersham to hang around her.  It suddenly flashed on him that, perhaps, Ferdy was in love with Lois Huntington.  Crash! went his kind feelings, his kind thoughts.  The idea of Ferdy making love to that pure, sweet, innocent creature!  It was horrible!  Her innocence, her charming friendliness, her sweetness, all swept over him, and he thrilled with a sense of protection.

Could he have known what Wickersham had done to poison her against him, he would have been yet more enraged.  As it was, Lois was at that time back at her old home; but with how different feelings from those which she had had but a few days before!  Sometimes she hated Keith, or, at least, declared to herself that she hated him; and at others she defended him against her own charge.  And more and more she truly hated Wickersham.

“So you met Mr. Keith?” said her aunt, abruptly, a day or two after her return.  “How did you like him?”

“I did not like him,” said Lois, briefly, closing her lips with a snap, as if to keep the blood out of her cheeks.

“What! you did not like him?  Girls are strange creatures nowadays.  In my time, a girl—­a girl like you—­would have thought him the very pink of a man.  I suppose you liked that young Wickersham better?” she added grimly.

“No, I did not like him either.  But I think Mr. Keith is perfectly horrid.”

“Horrid!” The old lady’s black eyes snapped.  “Oh, he didn’t ask you to dance!  Well, I think, considering he knew you when you were a child, and knew you were my niece, he might—­”

“Oh, yes, I danced with him; but he is not very nice.  He—­ah—­Something I saw prejudiced me.”

Miss Abby was so insistent that she should tell her what had happened that she yielded.

“Well, I saw him on the street helping a woman into a carriage.”

“A woman?  And why shouldn’t he help her in?  He probably was the only man you saw that would do it, if you saw the men I met.”

“A dis—­reputable woman,” said Lois, slowly.

“And, pray, what do you know of disreputable women?  Not that there are not enough of them to be seen!”

“Some one told me—­and she looked it,” said Lois, blushing.  The old lady unexpectedly whipped around and took her part so warmly that Lois suddenly found herself defending Gordon.  She could not bear that others should attack him, though she took frequent occasion to tell herself that she hated him.  In fact, she hated him so that she wanted to see him to show him how severe she would be.