Mrs. Towne kept her at her side until they reached the entrance and would have detained her until Professor Towne had made his way to them, had not Mr. Hammerton understood by the moving of her lips that she was not pleased and hurried her away.

"I hope that I shall never become acquainted with Professor Towne,"

exclaimed Tessa nervously, as Mr. Hammerton drew her hand within his arm.

"Why not? I thought that you were wrapped up in him as the young ladies say."

"Suppose I make a hole in him and find him stuffed with sawdust."

"You could immediately retire into a convent."

Dinah had mischievously fallen behind with her father and mother.

"Then I could never find my _good_ man?"

"Must you find him or die forlorn?"

For several moments she found no answer: then the words came deliberately; "Perhaps I _need_ not; I wonder why I thought there was a _must_ in the matter; why may I not be happy and helpful without ending as good little girls do in fairy stories? I need not live or die forlorn-and yet-Gus, you are the only person in the whole world to whom I would confess that I would rather be like the good little girl in the fairy story! Please forget it."

"It is too pleasant to forget," he answered. "I do not want you to be too ambitious or too wise for the good old fashions of wife and mother!"

"How can any woman be that!" she exclaimed indignantly.

"May you never know."

"What an easy time Eve had! All she had to do was to be led to Adam. She would not have chosen him a while afterward; he was altogether too much under her influence."

"That weakness has become a part of our original sin."

"It isn't yours," she retorted.

"Am I so different from other men?" he asked in a constrained voice.

"Most a.s.suredly. I should as soon think of a whole row of encyclopedias falling in love."

Mr. Hammerton was silent, for once repartee failed him.

Suddenly she asked, "Is your imagination a trial to you?"

"Haven't you often told me that I am stupid as an old geometry."

"And I hate geometry."

"You read, you write, you live, you love through your imagination. You wrap the person you love in a rosy mist that is the breath of your hopeful heart, and you see your hero through that mist. Of course the mist fades and you have but the ugly outline-then, without stopping to see what G.o.d hath wrought, you cry out, 'Oh, the horrible! the dreadful!' and run away with your fingers in your ears."

A few silent steps, then she said, "I deserve that. It is all true. Why did you not tell me before?"

"I left it to time and common sense."

"It will take a great deal of both to make me sensible," she answered humbly, and then added, "if suffering would root out my fancies-but I am like the child that tumbles and tumbles, and then tumbles again. I need to be guided by such a steady hand. Sometimes I do long so for somebody to do me good."

Her companion's silence might be sympathetic; as such she interpreted it, or she could not have said what she never ceased wondering at herself for saying-"I am not disappointed in love; but I _am_ disappointed in loving. I thought that love was once and forever. Poets say so."

"Yes, but we do not know how they live their poetry."

"I know that my poetry fails me when extremity comes."

"Has the extremity come?"

"Yes," she said bravely.

"And that is another thing that I am not to know."

"Not for five and fifty years. I will pigeon-hole all my experiences for you-if there is no one to object on my side or yours."

"What about the reading? Was it all that you expected?"

"Wait a minute; call Dine before we talk it over."

They had outwalked the others; Mr. Hammerton's strides would not be pleasant to keep pace with in the long walk of life, as Dinah had once told him. It was a truth that no one recognized so well as himself, that he lacked the power of adaptation; he was too tall or too short, too broad or too narrow, too crooked or too straight for any niche in Dunellen, but the one that he had found in his boyhood by the snug, safe corner in the home where Dinah was growing up to entangle herself in his heart, and Tessa, lovable and wise, to enthrone herself in his intellect. In the game of forfeits, when he had been doomed to "Bow to the wittiest, kneel to the prettiest, and kiss the one you love the best," in the long ago evenings, when they were all, old and young, children together, he had always bowed to Tessa and knelt to bewitching little Dine and kissed her. Now he bowed to Tessa, but he did not kiss Dine.

They stood waiting near a lamp-post; he, fidgeting as usual, she, straight and still.

"Lady Blue, you never put me on a pedestal, did you?"

"No, you never kept still long enough."

Professor Towne pa.s.sed them with Mrs. Towne leaning upon his arm; Mrs.

Towne bowed and smiled, he lifted his hat in recognition of Tessa's hesitating half inclination.

"Why, Tessa! Do you know him?"

"I almost spoke to him one day by mistake; I did not intend to bow, but he looked at me-I suppose the bow bowed itself."

"He has a n.o.ble presence! He is altogether finer physically than his cousin."

"I don't know that he is," she answered wilfully. Dinah came willingly enough; they walked more slowly and talked.

"Tessa," began Dine abruptly as they were brushing their hair at bedtime, "isn't Gus a fine talker?"

"Is he like Coleridge? He could talk four hours without interruption, but sometimes his listeners, learned men too, did not understand a word of it."

"I do not always understand Gus."

"Gus does not ramble; he is plain enough."

Dine brushed out a long curl and looked down upon it. "I shall ask him to give me a list of books that I ought to read."

"I confess that while I understand what he says I do not understand _him_. If you do, you are wiser than I."