channel, and never again asked her uncle any more questions touching her sitter.
But when her uncle left her presently to go to his farm, the girl sat down on a garden-bench and did—what she seldom did—nothing, for more than half an hour. She questioned herself; she questioned the impression that remained with her of the man who had suddenly and unexpectedly begun to engross her thoughts. Was it a monstrous self-delusion, or did this "favourite with all the ladies" show signs of beginning to care for her more than his undemonstrative manner permitted him to show?
The glamour of his personal beauty, of his grand manner and persuasive simplicity, which in its very silence expressed more than the volubility of others, had not been without their effect on the girl, who, with all her cleverness, all her emancipation from the susceptibilities and sentimentalities of her age, was practically ignorant of the world. Except the few youths she had met at Farley, redolent of the stables, and with limited capacities for stirring the female imagination, she knew but little of men under forty. Her father's friends, whom she had seen at home, were all solid business men, well on in middle life. They had been to her as so many stocks and stones; the young Nimrods latterly as so many pebbles on the pathway. But now loomed against her horizon something like a column, the superscription on which she could not read. It puzzled her, not only because of the difficulty in deciphering it, but by reason of the uncertainty she felt in determining her own sentiments with respect to those hieroglyphics.
