e point, Mrs. Goddard? If
there is anything more that I can do to facilitate your researches in
psychology--"

"You would help me? Even to the extent of being angry again?" She smiled
so pleasantly and frankly that John's wrath vanished.

"It is impossible to be angry with you. I am very sorry if I seemed to
be," he answered. "A man who has the good fortune to be thrown into your
society is a fool to waste his time in being disagreeable."

"I agree with the conclusion, at all events--that is, it is much better
to be agreeable. Is it not? Let us be friends."

"Oh, by all means," said John.

They walked on for some minutes in silence. John reflected that he had
witnessed a phase of Mrs. Goddard's character of which he had been very
far from suspecting the existence. He had not hitherto imagined her to be
a woman of quick temper or sharp speech. His idea of her was formed
chiefly upon her appearance. Her sad face, with its pathetic expression,
suggested a melancholy humour delighting in subdued and tranquil
thoughts, inclined naturally to the romantic view, or to what in the eyes
of youths of twenty appears to be the romantic view of life. He had
suddenly found her answering him with a sharpness which, while it roused
his wits, startled his sensibilities. But he was flattered as well. His
instinct and his observation of Mrs. Goddard when in the society of
others led him to believe that with Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose, or even with
Mr. Juxon, she was not in the habit of talking as she talked with him. He
was therefore inwardly pleased, so soon as his passing annoyance had
subsided, to feel that she made a difference between him and others.

It was quite true that she made a distinction, though she did so almost
unconsciously. It was perfectly natural, too. She was young in heart, in
spite of her thirty years and her troubles; she had an elastic
temperament; to a physiognomist her face would have shown a delicate
sensitiveness to impressions rather than any inborn tendency to sadness.
In spite of everything she was still young, and for two years and a half
she had been in the society of persons much older than herself, persons
she respected and regarded as friends, but persons in whom her youth
found no sympathy. It was natural, therefore, that when time to some
extent had healed the wound she had suffered and she suddenly found
herself in the society of a young and enthusiastic man, something of the
enforced soberness of he