loved. He had once or twice detected it in a tone of her voice, in a
remembered and perhaps even once idolized gesture, or in the accidental
lapse of some bewildering word. With the generosity of a large nature he
had put the thought aside, referring it to some selfish weakness of
his own, or--more fatuous than all--to a possible diminution of his own
affection.

He was standing on the steps ready to receive her. Few of her
appreciative sex could have remained indifferent to the tender and
touching significance of his silent and subdued welcome. He had that
piteous wistfulness of eye seen in some dogs and the husbands of many
charming women--the affection that pardons beforehand the indifference
it has learned to expect. She approached him smiling in her turn,
meeting the sublime patience of being unloved with the equally resigned
patience of being loved, and feeling that comforting sense of virtue
which might become a bore, but never a self-reproach. For the rest, she
was prettier than ever; her five years of expanded life had slightly
rounded the elongated oval of her face, filled up the ascetic hollows
of her temples, and freed the repression of her mouth and chin. A more
genial climate had quickened the circulation that North Liberty had
arrested, and suffused the transparent beauty of her skin with eloquent
life. It seemed as if the long, protracted northern spring of her youth
had suddenly burst into a summer of womanhood under those gentle skies;
and yet enough of her puritan precision of manner, movement, and gesture
remained to temper her fuller and more exuberant life and give it
repose. In a community of pretty women more or less given to the license
and extravagance of the epoch, she always looked like a lady.

He took her in his arms and half-lifted her up the last step of the
veranda. She resisted slightly with her characteristic action of