and embarrassed. His manner, too, was more than usually grave and
serious; and more than ever seemed to jar upon that audacious levity
which was this giddy girl's power and security in a society where all
feeling was dangerous. As he approached her she rose to her feet, but
almost before she knew it he had taken her hand and drawn her to a seat
beside him. This was not what Miss Jo had expected, but nothing is so
difficult to predicate as the exact preliminaries of a declaration of
love.

What did Culpepper say? Nothing, I fear, that will add anything to
the wisdom of the reader; nothing, I fear, that Miss Jo had not
heard substantially from other lips before. But there was a certain
conviction, fire-speed, and fury in the manner that was deliciously
novel to the young lady. It was certainly something to be courted in
the nineteenth century with all the passion and extravagance of the
sixteenth; it was something to hear, amid the slang of a frontier
society, the language of knight-errantry poured into her ear by this
lantern-jawed, dark-browed descendant of the Cavaliers.

I do not know that there was anything more in it. The facts, however, go
to show that at a certain point Miss Jo dropped her glove, and that in
recovering it Culpepper possessed himself first of her hand and then her
lips. When they stood up to go Culpepper had his arm around her waist,
and her black hair, with its sheaf of golden oats, rested against the
breast pocket of his coat. But even then I do not think her fancy was
entirely captive. She took a certain satisfaction in this demonstration
of Culpepper's splendid height, and mentally compared it with a former
flame, one lieutenant McMirk, an active, but under-sized Hector, who
subsequently fell a victim to the incautiously composed and monotonous
beverages of a frontier garrison. Nor was she so much preoccupied but