He understood that he was in a game against her, a game of courtship with his happiness at stake; and with all the madness of a lover, he developed some of the instinctive craftiness as well.
He began to plan, walking more deliberately and frowning in his effort to think. He recognised that her mother, of course, would be the great opponent of any free intercourse with her; and though he might perhaps call on her, in the restricted circle of parental surveillance, that would be to bring the lady of his dreams down to the commonplaces of everyday life, and he rejected the thought. What he wanted was her alone, away from everybody else in the world, as he had had her in the innocent beginnings of their companionship at Coulton, as he had always had her in imagination, since.
He finished his walk at the bowed pace of troubled meditation.
The mistress of the house in which he boarded had a motherly regard for her studious guest, and served him without intruding any remarks upon him whenever she saw him preoccupied with thought. Her daughter, long since discouraged in the first attentions of a somewhat stale coquetry, had fallen back on a disdainful silence in her unavoidable meetings with him, and spoke of him with the contempt of a critic whose appreciations had been despised. The nine-year-old son who completed the family was always silently engaged at breakfast in an attempt to avoid eating porridge—which he hated unhealthily
