distinguished. He remembered both till his dying day.

Next morning Geoffrey and Mr. Granger started before Lady Honoria
was up. Into the details of their long journey to Wales (in a crowded
third-class carriage) we need not enter. Geoffrey had plenty to think
of, but his fears had vanished, as fears sometimes do when we draw near
to the object of them, and had been replaced by a curious expectancy. He
saw now, or thought he saw, that he had been making a mountain out of
a molehill. Probably it meant nothing at all. There was no real danger.
Beatrice liked him, no doubt; possibly she had even experienced a fit of
tenderness towards him. Such things come and such things go. Time is a
wonderful healer of moral distempers, and few young ladies endure the
chains of an undesirable attachment for a period of seven whole months.
It made him almost blush to think that this might be so, and that the
gratuitous extension of his misfortune to Beatrice might be nothing more
than the working of his own unconscious vanity--a vanity which, did she
know of it, would move her to angry laughter.

He remembered how once, when he was quite a young fellow, he had been
somewhat smitten with a certain lady, who certainly, if he might judge
from her words and acts, reciprocated the sentiment. And he remembered
also, how when he met that lady some months afterwards she treated him
with a cold indifference, indeed almost with an insolence, that quite
bewildered him, making him wonder how the same person could show in such
different lights, till at length, mortified and ashamed by his mistake,
he had gone away in a rage and seen her face no more. Of course he had
set it down to female infidelity; he had served her turn, she had made
a fool of him, and that was all she wanted. Now he might enjoy
his humiliation. It did not occur to him that it might be simple
"cussedness," to borrow an energetic American term, or that she had not
really changed, but was angry with him for some reason which she did
not choose to show. It is difficult to weigh the motives of women in the
scales of male experience, and many other men besides Geoffrey have
been forced to give up the attempt and to console themselves with the
reflection that the inexplicable is generally not worth understanding.

Yes, probably it would be the same case over again. And yet, and
yet--was Beatrice of that class? Had she not too much of a man's
straightforwardness of aim to permit her to