reward me?--Will you call me
Walter?--say, thank you, Walter--just for once."

Jemima felt herself yielding to the voice and tone in which this was
spoken; but her very consciousness of the depth of her love made her
afraid of giving way, and anxious to be wooed, that she might be
reinstated in her self-esteem.

"No!" said she, "I don't think I can call you so. You are too old. It
would not be respectful." She meant it half in joke, and had no idea
he would take the allusion to his age so seriously as he did. He rose
up, and coldly, as a matter of form, in a changed voice, wished her
"Good-bye." Her heart sank; yet the old pride was there. But as he
was at the very door, some sudden impulse made her speak:

"I have not vexed you, have I, Walter?"

He turned round, glowing with a thrill of delight. She was as red as
any rose; her looks dropped down to the ground.

They were not raised when, half an hour afterwards, she said, "You
won't forbid my going to see Ruth, will you? because if you do,
I give you notice I shall disobey you." The arm around her waist
clasped her yet more fondly at the idea, suggested by this speech, of
the control which he should have a right to exercise over her actions
at some future day.

"Tell me," said he, "how much of your goodness to me, this last happy
hour, has been owing to the desire of having more freedom as a wife
than as a daughter?"

She was almost glad that he should think she needed any additional
motive to her love for him before she could have accepted him. She
was afraid that she had betrayed the deep, passionate regard with
which she had long looked upon him. She was lost in delight at her
own happiness. She was silent for a time. At length she said:

"I don't think you know how faithful I have been to you ever since
the days when you first brought me pistachio-candy from London--when
I was quite a little girl."

"Not more faithful than I have been to you," for in truth, the
recollection of his love for Ruth had utterly faded away, and he
thought himself a model of constancy; "and you have tried me pretty
well. What a vixen you have been!"

Jemima sighed; smitten with the consciousness of how little she had
deserved her present happiness; humble with the recollection of the
evil thoughts that had raged in her heart during the time (which she
remembered well, though he might have forgotten it) when Ruth had had
the affection which her jealous rival coveted.

"I m