able.

"Please, please, don't! Oh, Maria, what a brute you make me feel.
_Please_ don't," I cried, and raising my cousin from her Niobe-like
attitude, I comforted her as well as I could. She only said, "Oh,
Regie dear, how kind you are," and laid her sleek head against my arm
with an air of rest and trustfulness that touched my generosity to the
quick. What right had I, after all, to accept an affection to which I
could make no similar return? "However," thought I, "it's done now;
and they say it's always more on one side than the other; and at least
I'm a gentleman. I care for no one else, and she shall never know it
was chiefly to please the governor. 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. Beneath the sketch he had written, "They
were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not
divided." I remembered his telling me how young they were when they
were married. How his father had never care