"Even that."
They both laugh; but in Esther's laugh there is a ring of bitterness, which she herself hears, and wonders that he does not.
As they near the house, they see thin slits of crimson light through the dining-room shutters. Esther involuntarily quickens her pace.
"Why are you in such a hurry?" he asks, his eyes shining eager with reproachful passion in the passionless white starlight. "Who knows? to-morrow we may be dead; to-day we are as gods, knowing good and evil. This walk has not been to you what it has to me, or you would be in no haste to end it."
"I don't suppose it has," she answers, half-absently, with a sigh.
He had expected an eager disclaimer, and is disappointed.
"There can be but one explanation of that," he says, angrily.
"If you only knew – ," begins Esther, with an uncertain half-inclination to confess, though late.
"If you are going to tell me anything disagreeable," he says, quickly putting his hand before her mouth, "stop! Tell me to-morrow, or the day after, but not now – not now! Let there be one day of my life on which I may look back and say, as God said when he looked back upon His new world, 'Behold, it is very good!'"
She is silent.
"And yet, perhaps, it would be better if I knew the end of your sentence; if I only knew – what? – how little you care about me?"
"You are mistaken," she answers, roused into vehemence. "I love you so well, that I have grown hateful to myself!" and having spoken thus oracularly, she raises herself on tiptoe, lifts two shy burning lips to his, and kisses him voluntarily. Then, amazed at her own audacity, clothed with shame as with a garment, she tears herself out of his arms, as in delightful surprise he catches her to his heart, and flies with frenzied haste into the house.
CHAPTER XVII
The sweetness of September is that of the last few days spent with a friend that goeth on a very long journey; and we know not whether, when he returneth, we shall go to meet him with outstretched arms, or shall smile up at him only through the eyes of the daisies that flower upon our straight green graves.
"Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,"
and our sweetest seasons are, to my thinking, those in which the ecstasies of possession are mixed with the soft pain of expected parting. A September sun – such a one as warmly kissed the quiet faces of our young dead heroes, as they lay thick together on Alma's hill-side – is shining down with even mildness upon the just and the unjust, upon Constance Blessington's grass-green gown as she sits at breakfast, and on the hair crown of yellow gold with which Providence has seen fit to circle her dull fair brows.
"I think that you must have regretted being in such a hurry to run away from the garden and us," she is saying, with a gentle smile of lady-like malice, to Esther, à propos of her yesterday's misadventure.
"Sitting in the shade eating nectarines is certainly pleasanter occupation than grovelling on your hands and knees on a mud-bank," replies Esther, demurely.
"St. John is so terribly energetic!" says Miss Blessington, rather lackadaisically; "he would have walked me off the face of the earth long ago if I had let him."
Remembering the Chinese invitation, Esther cannot repress an involuntary smile.
"What about St. John?" says the young man, entering; having caught his own name, with that wonderful acuteness of hearing with which every one is endowed when themselves are in question.
"Much better have stuck to your parish church," says Sir Thomas, brandishing a large red and yellow bandanna, which is part of the old English costume, "than gone scrambling heigh-go-mad over hedges and ditches after new-fangled Puseyite mummeries!"
Gerard and his betrothed exchange a glance of intelligence. Gerard is looking slightly sentimental; his head is a little on one side; but on his discovering that he is an object of attention to Constance, it returns rather suddenly to the perpendicular.
Esther's eyes are brillianter than their wont; her cheeks are flushed with a deeper hue than the crimson lips of a foreign shell, but it is not the flush of a newly-departed sleep. The angel of slumber has passed by the portals of her brain, as the destroying angel passed by the blood-painted lintels of Israel. Thoughts sweeter than virgin honey, thoughts bitterer than gall, have kept her wakeful. Ere she went to bed, she spent three hours in writing letters of dismissal to Brandon, and at the end left him undismissed. "I cannot write it to him!" she cries, sitting up in bed in the dark, and flinging out blind arms into the black nothingness around her; "anything written sounds so harsh, so abrupt, so hard. I must tell him myself very gradually and gently, and tell him how sorry I am, and beg him to forgive me, and cry – go down on my knees, perhaps. No; I should look such a fool if I did that! After all, no one cries long over spilt milk – least of all any one so sensible and utterly unimaginative as poor dear Bob." And with that, thinking in a disparaging, hold-cheap way of him and his love, she turns the pillow over to try and find a cooler place on the under side for her burning face to rest on.
"Two dissyllabic names now passing many mouths by three dissyllabic names are here expressed," reads Miss Blessington, with distinct gravity, after breakfast that morning, out of an acrostic book that lies on the work-table before her, while Esther sits opposite with pencil and paper, ready to write down the products of the joint wisdom of their two minds. But the top of the pencil is being bitten by the young scribe's short white teeth, and her eyes are straying away absently – away through the open window and out to the sunshiny sward, where two of St. John's dogs, forbidden by Sir Thomas on pain of death, to set paw within the house, are rolling over one another, making abortive bites at each other's hind legs, and waggishly, with much growling and mumbling, taking each other's heads into their mouths.
"That is the whole," continues Constance. "These are the proofs; a woman, a wise man, a king, a poet, a beauty!"
Silence.
"A woman!" says Miss Blessington, cogitatively, resting her smooth chin on her hand, and looking vaguely round at the cabinets and busts for inspiration.
Esther makes no suggestion.
"A woman!" repeats Miss Blessington, raising her voice a little.
Esther comes back to consciousness with a little jump. "Oh! I beg your pardon; I don't think I was attending. A – what did you say?"
"A woman!" repeats Miss Blessington, for the third and last time.
"A woman!" echoes Esther, vacantly; "that is rather vague, is it not? There have been a good many women, one way or another."
"Let us try the next, then," says Constance, obligingly: "A wise man."
"Solomon!" answers Esther, glibly.
"I said a dissyllable name," remarks Constance, with gentle asperity.
The door opens, and St. John enters.
"Tell us a wise man's name?" "Who was a wise man?" cry they both in a breath.
"Solomon!" replies St. John, brilliantly.
"So I said," says Esther, smiling; "but, unluckily, it must be a two-syllabled wise man. I'm afraid that it would be disrespectful to abbreviate him into Solmon, wouldn't it?"
"One ought to be provided with a Bible, a Lemprière, and an encyclopædia before one attempts to grapple with these devices of Satan," says Gerard, sitting down on the arm of the sofa beside Constance and looking over her shoulder.
"A woman! Who is the woman?"
"We have not found out yet."
"A king! Who is the king?"
"We have not found out yet."
"You seem to be on the highroad to success," says he, laughing, and throwing himself back lazily.
"We have only just begun," says Miss Blessington, a little reproachfully. "You and Miss Craven are always so impatient."
"There are a great many two-syllabled kings' names," says Esther, with a prodigious effort to look intelligent and interested: "Edward, Henry, Louis, Ahab, Alfred, Joash!"
"I daresay it is one of those Jewish kings," says Constance, reflectively; "they are always fond of introducing Bible names into acrostics. Is there a Bible anywhere about, St. John?"
St. John walks slowly round the well-laden tables; looks over photograph books, Doré's "Elaine," Flaxman's "Dante;" but in vain. He comes back, and shakes his head.
"I will go and fetch one," says Constance, rising with noiseless grace, and rustling softly away among the console tables.
"May she long be occupied in searching the Scriptures for a dissyllabic king!" cries Gerard, drawing a long breath, and yawning as the door closes behind her.
"I am glad she is gone," says Esther, looking rather embarrassed, "as I have something to say to you."
"Say on."
"I must go home to-morrow," she continues, drawing hideous faces and wooden-legged cows on her bit of paper.
"Are you beginning to try experiments on me already?" he asks, incredulously, leaning his folded arms on the little table which forms a barrier between them.
"No; but I have received a letter from Jack this morning, which – "
"Which you are going to read to me?"
"Oh, no – no!" she answers, hastily, putting her hand in involuntary protection over her pocket; "it – it – wouldn't interest you." (It would have interested him rather too much.) "He seems to be missing me a good deal."
"Be honest," says St. John, stretching out his hand and taking hers captive, pencil and all. "Does he miss you as much as I shall?"
"More, a good deal, I should say," she replies, looking up with an arch smile; "I don't make your tea, and order your dinner, and darn your socks. One, two, three, four weeks," continues she, marking each number with her slender fingers on the table. "I have actually been here nearly a month, and" (with a half-absent sigh), "do you know, the very day I left home I told them – "
"Who's them?"
She blushes furiously. "Them – did I say them? Oh! I meant him, of course – Jack."
"Does he always speak of himself in the plural, like a king, or a reviewer?"
"Nonsense!" cries Esther, pulling away her hand rather impatiently. "Do you never make slips of the tongue?"
"Frequently. Well, you must write and tell them" (with a laughing emphasis on the them) "that they must get some one else to darn their socks, for that you have found something better to do."
"I could not have anything better," she answers, reddening with indignation. "You don't understand about Jack, or you would not make jokes!"
"It is a fault I'm not often guilty of; being funny never was my besetting sin," he answers, drily. "Essie, whenever you do go home, I have a great mind to go with you – if you will invite me."
"Oh, no, don't!" she cries, with involuntary eagerness, the pencil dropping from between her fingers.
"I believe you are ashamed of me," he says, angrily, walking off to the window to hide the flush of vexation which is invading his weather-worn cheeks.
"Ashamed of myself more likely," she cries, jumping up suddenly and following him.
"Why?"
"You fine gentlemen do not understand the
"'short and simple annals of the poor,'"
she answers, with a forced laugh. "You would probably be in the position of Mother Hubbard's singularly ill-used dog;
"When you came there,
The cupboard was bare.'"
"You think that gluttony, like gout, must be hereditary," says Gerard, laughing again, and yet looking very tender withal – not with the puling, milk-and-water tenderness of a green love-sick boy, but with the condensed, strong passion of a world-worn, world-tainted, half world-weary-grown man.
"There are other reasons too," says Essie, drooping her eyelids, over which the small blue veins —
"wandering, leave a tender stain – "
with a maiden's shyness, under the new-known fire of a lover's gaze.
"What other reasons?"
"I have never mentioned anything about you to Jack!" she answers, twisting her one paltry ring round her finger. "I don't suppose he is aware of your existence, unless he has bought a new 'Baronetage' since I left home – a piece of extravagance that I do not think he is likely to have been guilty of: and he would think it so odd if I were to appear suddenly on the scene, dragging you in tow."
"That would be easily explained," replies St. John, gravely, drawing himself up, and looking rather too conscious of the eight centuries of Norman blood in his strong veins. "I suppose that a man may be allowed to travel for a few hours in company with his future wife without any one being straightlaced enough or behind the world enough to call it odd!"
"Your future wife!" she repeats, with a dreamy, mournful smile. "Am I that? I think not. I shall never be your wife," she says, a look of melancholy inspiration crossing and darkening, as a travelling cloud crosses and darkens the blue eyes of a June brook, the sweet red and sweeter white of her little piquante face.
"Do you know any just cause or impediment why you should not be?" he asks, gaily.
"None," she answers, shuddering a little, as she has got into the habit of doing lately – "except" (throwing herself impulsively into his glad arms) "that it would make me so intolerably happy!"
There is a pause – a little brief pause – in which that shyest, fleetest-winged of earth's visitants – Happiness – folds her pinions and settles down for a little minute on two beating, trembling human hearts.
"Do you know," continues Essie, after awhile – raising herself, and looking up, with tears glistening, like dew on the autumn grass, upon her long swart lashes – "Do you know that in a book I was reading the other day I met this sentence: 'Le bonheur sur terre est un crime puni de mort comme le génie, comme la divinité'? It has haunted me ever since yesterday."
"As far as that goes," he answers, thoughtfully, "there is nothing in this world that is not punished with death, except Death himself. Well" (smiling fondly, and stroking her ruffled, scented love-locks), "may I come? may I be Mother Hubbard's dog?"
"Why do you want to come now, particularly?" she asks, in rather a troubled voice.
"Because I am a coward," he answers, laughing – "because I like a quiet life, and I imagine that there will be squally weather here when I announce my intention of taking you as a helpmeet for me."
"I am a mésalliance, I suppose?" she answers, rather sadly. "What will Sir Thomas say? Anything very bad?"
"Oh, nothing out of the way," answers Gerard, with a careless shrug. "He will call me an ass, and tell me that I always was, from a boy, the biggest fool he ever came across; and that, for his part, he'll wash his hands of me: and he'll probably conclude with a threat of cutting me off with a shilling."
"And will he?" asks Esther, quickly, looking up eager-eyed, parted-lipped.
"Why do you ask?" said the young man, sharply.
"Do you think that I want to marry a beggar?" inquires she, playfully, not detecting his suspicion.
"You need not be alarmed," he replies, coldly, and his arms slacken their fond hold a little. "He will not, for the very excellent reason that he cannot."
The door handle, turning, rattles. With one spring, Esther returns to her seat – to her deserted cows and impossible profiles. St. John looks out of the window. No transformation scene at Drury Lane could be more complete.
"Ahab – Jehu – Zimri – Omri – Joash!" recites Miss Blessington, entering, with an open Bible in her hand.
CHAPTER XVIII
"I am afraid you must think it very rude of us, leaving you alone on the last evening of your visit," says Miss Blessington next day to Esther, as the two girls stand together in the conservatory, picking bits of heliotrope and maidenhair, and regardless of the ten and twenty little pots that their long gowns have knocked down; "but, you see, it is such a long-standing engagement, and we can so seldom induce Sir Thomas to go to a ball, that we really could hardly get out of it."
She speaks politely, with that friendly suavity that one feels on the ultimate and penultimate days of their stay to a guest that one is glad to be rid of.
"Oh, never mind me," says Essie, lightly; "I can always amuse myself: and, besides, it will be very nearly bedtime by the time you go."
"They intend me to go with them," St. John had said to her overnight, à propos of this ball, "and of course I intend it too; only some prophetic instinct tells me that my head will begin to ache prodigiously towards dressing-time. I am half divided between that and toothache, only I suppose that the latter necessitates the simulating of acute bodily torture, and subjects one to unlimited offers of boiled figs, hopbags, laudanum, and the Lord knows what."
Gerard had found his betrothed stubborner than he had expected as to her expressed resolution of departure. Looking at the childish roundness of her soft face, at the dewy meekness of her heavenly eyes, he had fancied her malleable by his hand, as clay by the potter's; and so, in most things, she would have been. In most things, it was to her easier to yield than to resist – less trouble – and, besides, it pleased people; but in the one prime passion of her life, her love for her brother, you might as well try to move the Tower of London with your finger and thumb as to stir her. After half an hour of arguments, persuasions, caresses, St. John is constrained vexedly to own to himself that in that young faithful heart lover-love holds as yet only the second place. The sole concession he could win from her was that of one day, the day of the ball.
"We may imagine the clock put on thirty years, and ourselves already in possession," he says, laughing – "only minus the gout and wrinkles and spectacles we shall also have come into possession of by then."
"What the devil do people mean," says Sir Thomas, entering the morning-room that evening after dinner, with his hair brushed up into a stiff cockatoo, and tugging away at a huge pair of white kid gloves, off which he has already succeeded in bursting both buttons, "dragging a man away from his own fireside to see a lot of fools cutting capers, and flourishing their heels in each other's faces?"
From Sir Thomas's description one would imagine that the Cancan was habitually danced at the balls he frequents.
The door opens, and Miss Blessington makes her appearance; looking, not vain or conscious, but calmly defiant of any one to make a better – a triumph of lace and tulle and flowers, and milk-white flesh, and grand, cold curves and contours.
"Oh, how beautiful!" cries Essie, clasping her little hands, with the unaffected admiration of one handsome woman for another. "I know it is rude to make personal remarks; but is not she, Lady Gerard?"
"It is a pretty dress," replies miladi, whose unwieldy bulk not even the cunningest of Parisian couturières has been able to fashion into anything nearer than an approximation to any shape at all; "but I never think that Elise's taste is as good as Jane Clarke's used to be."
Constance has walked to a pier-glass, and is examining with anxiety a bite that a gnat has been savage enough to inflict on her face, a little under the lower lip, and which has been disturbing her wonted composed serenity ever since 3 p.m., when the catastrophe took place.
"Does it show much?" she asks, turning with a concerned, serious look to Esther.
"Oh no! hardly at all."
"I think I will put a little bit of sticking-plaster on it," she continues, gravely. "It will only look like a patch; and patches are always so becoming."
"Let me go and get you a bit!" cries Essie, good-naturedly, running off.
When she returns Sir Thomas is saying, fussily: "Now, why is not that boy dressed? Always the same! Always late! Never in time for anything!"
"He is not coming, Sir Thomas; he has got a headache, and is gone to lie down – at least he said so," replies Constance, coldly, but casting a scrutinising glance at Esther (who is deftly, with a small pair of scissors, cutting out a little circle of sticking-plaster) as she speaks.
"Stuff and nonsense!" cries "that boy's" papa, angrily – "a pack of lies! A fine Miss Molly you have made of your son, miladi! He'll be afraid of going out shooting next year for fear of getting his feet wet!"
"Is that about the right size?" inquires Esther, timidly, raising a pair of guilty pink cheeks, and exhibiting the result of her labours on the point of the scissors.
"Good God! miladi, do take that plaguy long tail of yours up! How the devil can I help treading on it?"
These are the last sweet words of Sir Thomas, as he follows wife and ward into the carriage. They are gone, and Essie sits down in the large empty room to await the resurrection of her lover. The sort of shy half-fear which always assails her at his expected approach comes over her more strongly than ever. A distant door bangs faintly somewhere about the house; then another nearer. "He is coming!" she says to herself, and the quick blood rushes tingling to her fingers' ends.
It is a hot night, and the tall French windows stand unshuttered and open. Some impulse of timid coquetry urges her to flee from before him: she is ashamed that he should see the plain letters of joy written on her face at his coming: she would fain have yet a few moments of the happiness of expectancy, to whose delights those of reality are but seldom comparable. From the terrace a flight of stone steps leads down, with many a twist, to the mere. In a minute Essie has run lightly down, and is standing by the water's edge.
The dahlias are nodding their round drowsy heads, and the sentinel hollyhocks stand up stiff and pompous with their clustered flower-spikes – rulers and law-givers among the flower-people; the little ripples are biting with playful tooth the low sedge-banks, and the tall bulrush forest, whence the coot and the waterhen families sailed out into life in the warm spring weather. To and fro rock the heavy, lazy, water-lily leaves, whose bloom-time is past two months ago. Through her garden, the sky, the high moon walks stately, holding her silver lamp, in whose light all things shine deliciously.
Essie stands entranced. It seems to her like the intermediate residence of some happy soul, freed from the world's toil and moil, shrived from sin, emancipated from life, where it should dwell in tempered bliss till that last day when heaven's brighter glories, stronger raptures, should burst upon and clothe it for aye. She strolls along the narrow gravel path, bathing her hands with childish delight in the moonbeams, and then stoops and picks up two or three little stones that the night's sweet alchemy has gifted with a bright short glory not their own. So stooping, she hears a man's quick firm foot running down the garden steps. She raises herself, and goes to meet him with "a moonlight-coloured smile" on her face. "Aren't they lovely?" she asks, holding up her pebbly treasures for him to look at.
Not speaking, he takes the little pink palm, stones and all, into his hand, and looks into her face; and then, as if yielding to a temptation that he hates, that he would fain resist, and to which, being over-strong, he must yet succumb, he snatches her to his breast, and kisses her fiercely – eyelids, lips, and neck – with a violence he is himself hardly conscious of.
"Stop!" she cries, surprised, half-shocked, pushing him away from her. "What do you mean? You frighten me!"
He recollects himself instantly, and releases her. "It is alarming being kissed, especially when you are not used to it," he answers, with a sneer.
She looks up at him in blank astonishment. Has he gone mad? Is it the moonlight that has given him that white wrathy look?
"Something has happened!" she says, quickly. "What is it? tell me!"
"Oh! nothing – a mere bagatelle!" he replies, with a little bitter laugh. "It is only that I have been hearing a pleasant piece of news."
"What is it?"
"Only that an acquaintance of mine is going to be married!"
"Is it an acquaintance of mine too?"
"About the most intimate you have, I should say: yourself, in fact!"
"Is that news?" she asks, trying to smile. "I am going to be married, am not I, to you?"
"I am not aware that my name is – Brandon," he answers, coldly, while his sorrowful, fierce eyes go through her heart like poisoned arrows.
She turns her head aside and groans. A great vague darkness blots out the broad moon, and the stars' thick cohorts; the bright water beside her grows black as hell's sluggish rivers.
He had not known how much he had been buoyed up by hope till that mute gesture of hers bid him despair.
"It's true, then?" he asks in a voice of sharp rage and anguish, catching hold of the white wonder of her arm, on which his fingers, unwittingly cruel, leave crimson prints.
"Is what true?" she asks, faintly, trying for yet a little longer to stave off Fate, to push away Nemesis, with her weak woman-fingers.
"That you are – God! am I choking? – engaged to Brandon?"
"I was once," she falters under her breath.
"How long ago?"
"When first I came here."
"And since then you have written to break it off?" he asks, while a tone of joyful hope vibrates in his deep voice.
"No, I have not," she answers, in a frightened whisper.
St. John's face gathers blackness. "I am to understand, then," he resumes, in a constrained voice, out of which the man's strong will keeps the pent passion from bursting forth, "that you belonged to him at the time when I kept you out of bed one night to listen to an interesting chapter in my own autobiography?"
"Yes."
"And when, in reply to my inquiries, you denied having any connection beyond common acquaintance with – with him?"
"Yes."
"And when you were good enough to overlook all trifling obstacles, and to consent to marry me?"
"Yes."
The little catechism ended, the last cobweb of doubt torn away, they stand dumb. Esther's guilty head sinks down on her breast as a flower's head sinks overladen with rain. Suddenly she looks up and stretches out her arms. "Speak to me!" she says, huskily. "Curse me! strike me! call me some bad name – only speak!"
"I wish to God you were a man!" he answers, in a hard, low voice; while his straight brows draw together into one dark line across his face, and his lips look white and thin under his moustache.
"That you might kill me!" she says, incoherent with excitement. "Well, kill me now! If revenge is so pleasant to you, I give you leave!"
"Let us have no heroics, please," says he, contemptuously; "you don't appear to be aware that it is not the fashion for English gentlemen to murder women who make fools of them. It may be a sensible practice, but it is at present confined to the tiers état."
Having spoken, he makes a slight movement to depart.
"Are you going to give me up?" she cries, smiting her hands together, and forgetting in her great dismay to reflect whether the remonstrance accorded well with her dignity or not.
"I have no claim upon you," he answers, icily.
"What do you mean?" she cries, passionately. "You are unjust. There could be nothing too bad for him to say of me, but what injury have I done you? You ought to thank me and praise me for having been wicked and dishonourable and double-dealing for your sake."
"For my sake!" he repeats, with a sardonic smile. "I am hardly so conceited as to take it personally."
"What do you mean?" she asks, quickly. "If I did not do it for your sake, for whose did I?"
He is silent.
"Do you mean," she inquires, slowly, her cheeks paling to the whiteness of snowdrops blowing, "that you think I gave him up because I wanted to be a grand lady – because I wanted to have all these fine things" (looking round at the flowering gardens, at the broad lake, at the stately house shimmering in the moonshine) "belonging to me?"
Still he holds his peace.
"Is that what you meant?" she repeats, urgently.
"I meant," he says, looking up, his eyes flashing with a hard, metallic gleam, "that you thought a rich man a better investment than a poor one, and, being equally and conveniently indifferent to both, you thought it wisest to select the former."
"If such is your opinion of me," she says, turning away indignantly, "I don't wonder at your being in such a hurry to be rid of me!"
He looks askance at her out of the corners of his eyes. She has hidden her face in her hands, but by the panting breast and heaved white shoulder he sees that she is weeping – that a storm of sobs is shaking her childish frame.
"I am in a hurry to be rid of you!" he says, harshly, steeling himself against her. "From a woman who could throw a man over with the deliberate, cold-blooded artlessness you have done, one may well sing 'Te Deum' for being rescued in time."
She flings up her little head proudly, and the dusk splendour of her eyes blazes through great tears. "Listen to me!" she says, laying hold of his arm with one small burning hand. "I am a bad girl, I know, but I am not the calculating, mercenary wretch you take me for. I tell you honestly that the first day I came here – I had never been staying at a great house before – I thought it must be pleasant to live in large rooms, and have gilt and ormolu and fine pictures about one, and to have carriages and horses and servants, and not to be obliged to think twice before one spent sixpence; and I thought, too" (her long neck droops, and she blushes painfully as she makes the confession), "what a pity it was that I was already engaged, for that otherwise, as I was pretty, you might have taken a fancy to me – " She stops, choked with maiden shame. Upon his averted face an enduring flush, like a hectic autumn leaf's, burns red and angry.
"But as soon as I saw you, almost," she continues, commanding her tears with great difficulty – "as soon as you spoke to me, all such thoughts went out of my head. I don't know why they did," she says, simply. "You were not particularly pleasant or civil; I did not think you good-looking, and you gave me the idea of being ill-tempered; but" (with a sigh) "one cannot reason about those sort of things. I began to think so much about what you were, that I forgot to remember what you had."
He makes no comment upon her confession.
"Do you believe me?" she asks, eagerly, her little fingers tightening their clasp upon his coat-sleeve.