If badly, you have two alternatives: either you recover or you don't. If you recover, you have nothing to worry about. If you don't, and have followed my advice clear through, you have done with worry forever.
Mrs. McGuire was in a gale of laughter by the time she had finished reading this; so, too, was Susan. Keith also was laughing, but his laughter did not have the really genuine ring to it—which fact did not escape Susan.
"Well, anyhow, he let Mis' McGuire in—an' that's somethin'," she muttered to herself, as Mrs. McGuire took her departure. "Besides, he talked to her real pleasant—an' that's more."
As the days passed, others came, also, and Keith talked with them. He even allowed Dorothy Parkman to be admitted one day.
[Illustration: HE GAVE HER ALMOST NO CHANCE TO SAY ANYTHING HERSELF]
Dorothy had not come until after long urging on the part of Susan and the assurance that Keith had said he would see her. Even then nothing would have persuaded her, she told Susan, except the great hope that she could say something, in some way, that would set her right in Keith's eyes.
So with fear and trembling and with a painful embarrassment on her face, but with a great hope in her heart, she entered the room and came straight to Keith's side.
For a moment the exultation of a fancied success sent a warm glow all through her, for Keith had greeted her pleasantly and even extended his hand. But almost at once the glow faded and the great hope died in her heart, for she saw that even while she touched his hand, he was yet miles away from her.
He laughed and talked with her—oh, yes; but he laughed too much and talked too much. He gave her almost no chance to say anything herself. And what he said was so inconsequential and so far removed from anything intimately concerning themselves, that the girl found it utterly impossible to make the impassioned explanation which she had been saying over and over again all night to herself, and from which she had hoped so much.
Yet at the last, just before she bade him good-bye, she did manage to say something. But in her disappointment and excitement and embarrassment, her words were blurted out haltingly and ineffectually, and they were not at all the ones she had practiced over and over to herself in the long night watches; nor were they received as she had palpitatingly pictured that they would be, with Keith first stern and hurt, and then just dear and forgiving and UNDERSTANDING.