He became more positively odious every day in the widow's eyes.
We are not going to say a great deal about Pen's courtship of Miss Fotheringay, for the reader has already had a specimen of her conversation, much of which need surely not be reported.

Pen sate with her hour after hour, and poured forth all his honest boyish soul to her.
Everything he knew, or hoped, or felt, or had read, or fancied, he told to her.

He never tired of talking and longing.

One after another, as his thoughts rose in his hot eager brain, he clothed them in words, and told them to her.

Her part of the tete-a-tete was not to talk, but to appear as if she understood what Pen talked (a difficult matter, for the young fellow blurted out no small quantity of nonsense), and to look exceedingly handsome and sympathising.