The father gathered his voice and answered huskily, laying one hand upon
his chest, and with the other gesturing up by the Winslow elm to the
grove behind it.

She nodded. "Yes!... With Arthur, you say?... Yes!... Thank you!...
Yes!" She passed with Godfrey through the wide gate.

"That's like Leonard," said the lover. "He'll tell Arthur he hasn't done
a thing he hadn't a perfect right to do."

"And Arthur has not, Godfrey. He has only been less chivalrous than we
should have liked him to be. If he had been first in the field, and
Leonard had come in and carried her off, you would have counted it a
perfect mercy all round."

"Ho-oh! it would have been! Leonard would have made her happy. Arthur
never can, and she can never make him so. But what he has done is not
all: look how he did it! Leonard was his beloved and best friend"--

"Except his brother Godfrey"--

"Except no one, Ruth, unless it's you. I'm neither persuasive nor kind,
nor often with him. Proud of him I was, and never prouder than when I
knew him to be furiously in love with her, while yet, for pure, sweet
friendship's sake, he kept standing off, standing off."

"I wish you might have seen it, Godfrey. It was so beautiful--and so
pitiful!"