"Yes--most people would say I was handsome." She was really wondering what Arthur Venning would say she was.

Her feeling about him was decidedly queer.

She would not admit to herself that she was in love with him or that she wanted to marry him, yet she spent every minute when she was alone in wondering what he thought of her, and in comparing what they had done to-day with what they had done the day before.
"He didn't ask me to play, but he certainly followed me into the hall," she meditated, summing up the evening.

She was thirty years of age, and owing to the number of her sisters and the seclusion of life in a country parsonage had as yet had no proposal of marriage.

The hour of confidences was often a sad one, and she had been known to jump into bed, treating her hair unkindly, feeling herself overlooked by life in comparison with others.