compliment.

'I am not disposed to tell the writer's name,' she replied, with a
dudgeon that was very great for one whose whole stock of it was a trifle.
And she passed on and left him standing alone.

Thus further conversation was checked; but, through having rearranged the
hours of his country lessons, Christopher met her the next Wednesday, and
the next Friday, and throughout the following week--no further words
passing between them. For a while she went by very demurely, apparently
mindful of his offence. But effrontery is not proved to be part of a
man's nature till he has been guilty of a second act: the best of men may
commit a first through accident or ignorance--may even be betrayed into
it by over-zeal for experiment. Some such conclusion may or may not have
been arrived at by the girl with the lady-apple cheeks; at any rate,
after the lapse of another week a new spectacle presented itself; her
redness deepened whenever Christopher passed her by, and embarrassment
pervaded her from the lowest stitch to the tip of her feather. She had
little chance of escaping him by diverging from the road, for a figure
could be seen across the open ground to the distance of half a mile on
either side. One day as he drew near as usual, she met him as women meet
a cloud of dust--she turned and looked backwards till he had passed.

This would have been disconcerting but for one reason: Christopher was
ceasing to notice her. He was a man who often, when walking abroad, and
looking as it were at the scene before his eyes, discerned successes and
failures, friends and relations, episodes of childhood, wedding feasts
and funerals, the landscape suffering greatly by these visions, until it
became no more than the patterned wall-tints about the paintings in a
gallery; something necessary to the tone, yet not regarded. Nothing but