"Will you not accept me as an escort to your home ?" he said formally.

"I do not know," she returned simply, the sort of honest trouble in her glance that is seen only in very young eyes.
"'What reason in the world!" he returned, with a crafty sharpness of astonishment.
She continued to gaze upon him thoughtfully, while he tried to look into her eyes, but was baffled because the radiant beams from the lady's orbs (as the elder Chenoweth might have said) rested somewhere dangerously near his chin, which worried him, for, though his chin made no retreat and was far from ill-looking, it was, nevertheless, that feature which he most distrusted.

"Won't you tell me why not ?" he repeated, uneasily.
"Because," she answered at last, speaking hesitatingly, "because it isn't so easy a matter for me as you seem to think.

You have not been introduced to me, and I know you never will be, and that what you told me was true." "Which part of what I told you ?" The question escaped from him instantly.
"That the others might come when they liked, but that you could not." "Oh yes, yes." His expression altered to a sincere dejection; his shoulders drooped, and his voice indicated supreme annoyance.

"I might have known someone would tell you! Who was it?
Did they say why I--" "On account of your quarrel with my father." "My quarrel with your father!" he exclaimed; and his face lit with an elated surprise; his shoulders straightened.