sportive and innocent freaks of a child. In his rustic sincerity he was
forever at the point of condemning her and forever relenting before the
appealing sweetness of her look. He told himself twenty times a day that
she flirted outrageously with him, though he still refused to admit that
in her heart she was to blame for her flirting. A broad and charitable
distinction divided always the thing that she was from the thing that
she did. It was as if his love discerned in her a quality of soul of
which she was still unconscious.

"Molly," he burst out almost fiercely, "will you marry me?"

The smile was still in her eyes, but a slight frown contracted her
forehead.

"I've told you a hundred times that I shall never marry anybody," she
answered, "but that if I ever did---"

"Then you'd marry me."

"Well, if I were obliged to marry _somebody_, I'd rather marry you than
anybody else."

"So you do like me a little?"

"Yes, I suppose I like you a little--but all men are the same--mother
used always to tell me so."

Poor distraught Janet Merryweather! There were times when he was seized
with a fierce impatience of her, for it seemed to him that her ghost
stood, like the angel with the drawn sword, before the closed gates of