ve.
She grew nervous, and at last said:

"I am tired. You put in that flower."

He took the book and pencils from her, as she rose from her chair and
gave him her place, and with a few strong and rapid strokes finished
the sketch.

"After all," she said to herself, with hearty appreciation, "men do
have the advantage of girls. He bothered me dreadfully, and I did not
bother him in the least. And yet I stood as near to him as he did to
me."

Mrs. Belding came in a moment later. She was in high spirits. They had
had a good meeting--had converted a Jew, she thought. She admired the
sketch very much; hoped Alice had been no trouble to Farnham. He walked
home with the ladies, and afterward smoked a cigar with great
deliberation under the limes.

Mrs. Belding asked Alice how they had got on.

"He did not eat you, you see. You must get out of your ideas of men,
especially men of Arthur Farnham's age. He never thinks of you. He is
old enough to be your father."

Alice kissed her mother and went to her own room, calculating on the
way the difference between her age and Captain Farnham's.

IX.

A DRAMA WITH TWO SPECTATORS.

The words of Bott lingered obstinately in Maud Matchin's mind. She gave
herself no rest from dwelling on them. Her imagination was full, day
after day, of glowing pictures of herself and Farnham in tete-a-tete;
she would seek in a thousand ways to tell her love--but she could never
quite arrange her avowal in a satisfactory manner. Long before she came
to the decisive words which were to kindle his heart to flame in the
imaginary dialogue, he would himself take fire by spontaneous
combustion, and, falling on his knees, would offer his hand, his heart,
and his fortune to her in words taken from "The Earl's Daughter" or the
"Heir of Ashby."

"Oh, pshaw! that's the way it ought to be," she would say to herself.
"But if he won't--I wonder whether I ever could have the brass to do
it? I don't know why I shouldn't. We are both human. Bott wouldn't have
said that if there was nothing in it, and he's a mighty smart man."

The night usually gave her courage. Gazing into her glass, she saw
enough to inspire her with an idea of her own invincibility; and after
she had grown warm in bed she would doze away, resolving with a stout
heart that she would try her fate in the morning. But when day came,
the enterprise no longer seemed so simple. Her scanty wardrobe struck
her with cowardice as she sur