m kisses if he cared for them. They were his by all the
rights of contract. He certainly had the best of the bargain, but he
should never know how much the best of it he had. He had told her
that there had better be no speaking of John Gordon. There certainly
should be none on her part. She had told him that she must continue
to think of him. There at any rate she had been honest. But he should
not see that she thought of him.

Then she endeavoured to assure herself that this thinking would die
out. Looking round the world, her small world, how many women there
were who had not married the men they had loved first! How few,
perhaps, had done so! Life was not good-natured enough for smoothness
such as that. And yet did not they, as a rule, live well with
their husbands? What right had she to expect anything better than
their fate? Each poor insipid dame that she saw, toddling on with
half-a-dozen children at her heels, might have had as good a John
Gordon of her own as was hers. And each of them might have sat on a
summer day, at an open window, looking out with something, oh, so far
from love, at the punctual steps of him who was to be her husband.

Then her thoughts turned, would turn, could not be kept from turning,
to John Gordon. He had been to her the personification of manliness.
That which he resolved to do, he did with an iron will. But his
manners to all women were soft, and to her seemed to have been
suffused with special tenderness. But he was chary of his words,--as
he had even been to her. He had been the son of a banker at Norwich;
but, just as she had become acquainted with him, the bank had broke,
and he had left Oxford to come home and find himself a ruined man.
But he had never said a word to her of the family misfortune. He had
been six feet high, with dark hair cut very short, somewhat full
of sport of the roughest kind, which, however, he had abandoned
instantly. "Things have so turned out," he had once said to Mary,
"that I must earn something to eat instead of riding after foxes."
She could not boast that he was handsome. "What does it signify?" she
had once said to her step-mother, who had declared him to be stiff,
upsetting, and ugly. "A man is not like a poor girl, who has nothing
but the softness of her skin to depend upon." Then Mrs Lawrie had
declared to him that "he did no good coming about the house,"--and he
went away.

Why had he not spoken to her? He had said that one word, promising