"The next time I'll remind you every minute." She smiled radiantly as he looked at her, and he felt that her indiscretions, her lack of constancy, her unkindness even, were but the sportive and innocent freaks of a child.

In his rustic sincerity he was forever at the point of condemning her and forever relenting before the appealing sweetness of her look.

He told himself twenty times a day that she flirted outrageously with him, though he still refused to admit that in her heart she was to blame for her flirting.

A broad and charitable distinction divided always the thing that she was from the thing that she did.

It was as if his love discerned in her a quality of soul of which she was still unconscious.
"Molly," he burst out almost fiercely, "will you marry me ?" The smile was still in her eyes, but a slight frown contracted her forehead.
"I've told you a hundred times that I shall never marry anybody," she answered, "but that if I ever did---" "Then you'd marry me." "Well, if I were obliged to marry _somebody_, I'd rather marry you than anybody else." "So you do like me a little ?" "Yes, I suppose I like you a little--but all men are the same--mother used always to tell me so." Poor distraught Janet Merryweather! There were times when he was seized with a fierce impatience of her, for it seemed to him that her ghost stood, like the angel with the drawn sword, before the closed gates of his paradise.