"I don't want you." Bill slunk off, and Miriam wondered and dreaded what was coming.

There was a silence about the youth that made her still with apprehension.

It was not his furies, but his quiet resolutions that she feared.
Turning his face a little to one side, so that she could not see him, he began, speaking slowly and painfully: "Do you think--if I didn't come up so much--you might get to like somebody else--another man ?" So this was what he was still harping on.
"But I don't know any other men.

Why do you ask ?" she replied, in a low tone that should have been a reproach to him.
"Why," he blurted, "because they say I've no right to come up like this--without we mean to marry--" Miriam was indignant at anybody's forcing the issues between them.

She had been furious with her own father for suggesting to Paul, laughingly, that he knew why he came so much.
"Who says ?" she asked, wondering if her people had anything to do with it.