It would have been far better, he thought, if she had come and told him that she could not possibly accept him, and that nothing more must be said about it.

But then he did not believe, if she had given him time to say the words he wished to say, that she would have come to such a decision; and as he called up her lovely face and figure, as it stood framed in the open doorway, with a background of the sunlit arbor and fields, the gorgeous distant foliage, with the blue sky and its white clouds and circling birds, he thought of the rapture and ecstasy which would have come to him, if she had listened to his words, and had given him but a smile of encouragement.
But here came Mrs Null, with a fat brown book in her hand.

"One of the funniest things," she said, as she came to the door, "is Mr Salmon's chapter on paradoxes.

He thinks it would be quite improper to issue a book of this kind without alluding to geographical paradoxes.

Listen to this one." And then she read to him the elucidation of the apparent paradox that there is a certain place in this world where the wind always blows from the south; and another explaining the statement that in certain cannibal islands the people eat themselves.