CHAPTER IV

A BELATED CONFIDENCE When Mrs. Gilmour’s boarders began to refer to Armitage as “Miss Ayres’ young man” the assumption was entirely gratuitous. Armitage himself would have been dumbfounded to learn that his weekly call was regarded as an amatory adventure, and Cynthia Ayres when the girl across the hall made a jesting allusion to her “beau,” flamed into as passionate a defense as if the young man referred to had been accused of crime. Yet without any definite decision to that effect, Thursday had come to be reserve…