I hope you don't care much," all her pride and womanliness was roused and she answered promptly: "Of course, I don't care; do you think I would wish to marry Judge Markham if I were not all over that childish affair?
You have not seen him yet.

He is a splendid man." Ethelyn felt better after paying this tribute to Richard Markham, and she liked him better, too, now that she had spoken for him, but Frank's reply, "Yes, mother told me so, but said there was a good deal of your Westernism about him yet," jarred on her feelings as she plucked the roses growing at the end of the piazza and crushed them, thorns and all, in her hands, feeling the smart less than the dull, heavy throbbing at her heart.

Frank did not seem to her just as he used to be; he was the same polished dandy as of old, and just as careful to perform every little act of gallantry, but the something lacking which she had always felt to a certain extent was more perceptible now, and to herself she accused him of having degenerated since he had passed from her influence.

She never dreamed of charging it to her interviews with Judge Markham, whose topics of conversation were so widely different from Frank's.

She was not generous enough to concede anything in his favor, though she felt glad that Frank was not quite the same he had been--it would make the evening bridal before her easier to bear; and Ethelyn's eyes were brighter and her smiles more frequent as she sat down to dinner and answered Mrs.Van Buren's question: "Where is the Judge that he does not dine with us ?" "Sick, is he ?" Mrs.Van Buren said, when told of his headache, while Frank remarked, "Sick of his bargain, maybe," laughing loudly at his own joke, while the others laughed in unison; and so the dinner passed off without that stiffness which Ethelyn had so much dreaded.
After it was over, Mrs.Dr.Van Buren felt better, and began to talk of the "Judge," and to ask if Ethelyn knew whether they would board or keep house in Washington the coming winter.