an unfailing good sense, and a very ready wisdom, as I grew more and
more to perceive. But he was an inch or so shorter than Miss Bentley,
and in his sunny blondness, with his golden red beard and hair, and his
pinkish complexion, he wanted still more the effect of an emotional
equality with her. He was very handsome, with features excellently
regular; his smile was celestially beautiful; innocent gay lights danced
in his blue eyes, through lashes and under brows that were a lighter
blond than his beard and hair.


VI.

The next morning, which was of a Saturday, when I did not go to town, he
came over to us again from the shadow of his sombre maples, and fell
simply and naturally into talk about his engagement. He was much fuller
in my wife's presence than he had been with me alone, and told us the
hopes he had of Mrs. Bentley's yielding within a reasonable time. He
seemed to gather encouragement from the sort of perspective he got the
affair into by putting it before us, and finding her dissent to her
daughter's marriage so ridiculous in our eyes after her consent to her
engagement that a woman of her great good sense evidently could not
persist in it.

"There is no personal objection to myself," he said, with a modest
satisfaction. "In fact, I think she really likes me, and only dislikes
my engagement to Edith. But she knows that Edith is incapable of
marrying against her mother's will, or I of wishing her to do so; though
there is nothing else to prevent us."

My wife allowed herself to say, "Isn't it rather cruel of her?"