admiration—yes, admiration—from her to him! It took away his breath, and took the strength out of him. He gave a low sort of chuckle of laughter, most bizarre expression of his feelings, and dropped into the first chair he could find in such agonies of bashfulness and pleasure as would have better beseemed a charity boy than a man trained to encounter with the world. “It is very funny, as you say,” he gasped; and then saw how ridiculous his speech was, and put his hands in his pockets, and blushed all over a violent painful red.

“I don’t think it is the least funny,” said Kate, now altogether in a different humour. “I might have been killed, and you might have been killed, your mother told me; and we are both only{58} children, and what would they have done? I don’t mind so much about us, for we should but have died, and there would have been an end of it; but only think—what would they have done?” cried Kate, turning upon him eyes which were full of the suggested woe.

{58}

“Ah!” he cried, despising himself, “there you go above me, as is natural. It is like you to think it would not have mattered for yourself—only for those who loved you, and the desolate world it would have left them. It is like you to think of that.”

“How can you tell it is like me,” said Kate, “when you don’t know me? I was thinking of papa, and of your mother, not of anything so fine as a desolate world.”

“You were thinking like a true woman,” said the young man, gazing at her with all the romance of a mother’s only son in his unsophisticated eyes.

This was all very well for the moment, but Kate had dispersed the real impression which she had actually felt by uttering it, and it was too early{59} in their acquaintance to plunge into romance; so she changed the subject skilfully. “Please don’t abuse women,” she said. “I know it is the fashion—and most girls rather like to give in to it, and think it is clever to like men’s society best. But I am fond of women, though, perhaps, you will think it weak of me. If I had to choose, I should rather have all women than all men—though, of course, one likes a mixture best.”

{59}

“Abuse women!” cried John; “I should as soon think of blaspheming heaven. It would be blasphemy. They are heaven to our earth—they are——”

“Hush,” said Kate, holding up her little white rose-tipped hand with a certain maternal superiority. “Don’t be extravagant. When 

 Prev. P 25/135 next