“Thank you, no.”
“Here is this, however,” he said, handing her a folded slip of paper.
She opened it and looked at the writing inside. It was a receipt from the postmaster at Stockchute to Lafayette Ashton for certain letters delivered for mailing. The address of the letter to Thomas Blake was given in full. The girl colored, bit her lip, and 95 murmured contritely: “You have turned the tables on me. I deserved it!”
“Please don’t take it that way!” he begged. “My purpose was merely to assure you the letter was mailed. After all, I am a stranger, Miss Knowles.”
“No, not now,” she differed.
“It’s very kind of you to say it! Yet it’s just as well for me to start off with no doubts in your mind, in view of the fact that in two or three weeks––”
“Yes?” she asked, as he hesitated.
“I––Your father will hardly keep me more than two weeks, unless––unless I make good,” he answered.
“I guess you needn’t worry about that,” she replied, somewhat ambiguously.
He shrugged. “It is very good of you to say it, Miss Knowles. I know I shall fail. Can you expect anyone who has always lived within touch of millions, one who has spent more in four years at college than all this range is worth––He cut my allowance repeatedly, until it was only a beggarly twenty-five thousand.”