Could she help being so delighted to listen to him, and so grieved to depart?
What thus she felt she expressed, no less simply and no less guilelessly: candour sometimes completely blinded and misled him.

No, she could not be in love, or she could not so frankly own that she loved him--it was a sisterly and grateful sentiment.
"The dear girl--I am rejoiced to think so," said Maltravers to himself; "I knew there would be no danger." Was he not in love himself ?--The reader must decide.
"Alice," said Maltravers, one evening after a long pause of thought and abstraction on his side, while she was unconsciously practising her last lesson on the piano--"Alice,--no, don't turn round--sit where you are, but listen to me.

We cannot live always in this way." Alice was instantly disobedient--she did turn round, and those great blue eyes were fixed on his own with such anxiety and alarm, that he had no resource but to get up and look round for the meerschaum.

But Alice, who divined by an instinct his lightest wish, brought it to him, while he was yet hunting, amidst the further corners of the room, in places where it was certain not to be.

There it was, already filled with the fragrant Salonica glittering with the gilt pastile, which, not too healthfully, adulterates the seductive weed with odours that pacify the repugnant censure of the fastidious--for Maltravers was an epicurean even in his worst habits;--there it was, I say, in that pretty hand which he had to touch as he took it; and while he lit the weed he had again to blush and shrink beneath those great blue eyes.
"Thank you, Alice," he said; "thank you.