I suppose it will all come right." Whilst I pondered, Maria had dried her eyes, and now sat up, gazing before her, almost in her old attitude.
"I wonder, Regie dear," she said, presently--"I wonder how you found out that I--that we--that I _cared_--" "Oh, I don't know," said I, inanely, for I could not say that nothing could be plainer.
"I always used to think that to live in this neighbourhood would be paradise," murmured Maria, looking sentimentally but vacantly into a box of seedling balsams.
"I'm very glad you like it," said I.I could not make pretty speeches.
An unpleasant conviction was stealing over my mind that I had been a fool, and had no one but myself to blame.

I began to think that Maria would not have died of consumption even if I had not proposed to her, and to doubt if I were really so heartbroken as I had fancied.

(Indeed the society of my cousin, who was a lady, had by this time gone far to cure me of my sentiment for one who was not, and who had been sensible enough to marry a man in her own rank of life, to my father's great relief, and, as I then thought, to my life-long disappointment.) The whole affair seemed a mockery, and I wished it were a dream.

It was not thus that my father had plighted his troth to my fair mother.
This was not the sort of affection that had made happy the short lives of Leo's parents.

The lemon-scented verbena which I was pounding between my fingers bitterly recalled a little sketch of the monument to their memory which Leo had shown me in his Bible, where he had also pressed a sprig of verbena.