eyelashes, as he moved off.

"Going to the orchard?" she asked.

"Yes."

She smiled a little.

"That's right!"

He glanced back at her. Had she known how bravely he restrained
himself she might have made as much a hero of him as of the knight
Amadis. For he was wounded to the heart--his brightest hopes were
frustrated, and at the very instant he walked away from her he
would have given his life to have held her for a moment in his
arms,--to have kissed her lips, and whispered to her the pretty,
caressing love-nonsense which to warm and tender hearts is the
sweetest language in the world. And with all his restrained
passion he was irritated with what, from a man's point of view, he
considered folly on her part,--he felt that she despised his love
and himself for no other reason than a mere romantic idea, bred of
loneliness and too much reading of a literature alien to the
customs and manners of the immediate time, and an uncomfortable
premonition of fear for her future troubled his mind.

"Poor little girl!" he thought--"She does not know the world!--and
when she DOES come to know it--ah, my poor Innocent!--I would
rather she never knew!"

Meanwhile she, left to herself, was not without a certain feeling