York." She persevered in
this reference to himself, for when he had assented to her remark about
New York, she asked him whether he had quite given up the South.

"Given it up--the poor, dear, desolate old South? Heaven forbid!" Basil
Ransom exclaimed.

She looked at him for a moment with an added softness. "I presume it is
natural you should love your home. But I am afraid you think I don't
love mine much; I have been here--for so long--so little. Miss
Chancellor _has_ absorbed me--there is no doubt about that. But it's a
pity I wasn't with her to-day." Ransom made no answer to this; he was
incapable of telling Miss Tarrant that if she had been he would not have
called upon her. It was not, indeed, that he was not incapable of
hypocrisy, for when she had asked him if he had seen his cousin the
night before, and he had replied that he hadn't seen her at all, and she
had exclaimed with a candour which the next minute made her blush, "Ah,
you don't mean to say you haven't forgiven her!"--after this he put on a
look of innocence sufficient to carry off the inquiry, "Forgiven her for
what?"

Verena coloured at the sound of her own words. "Well, I could see how
much she felt, that time at her house."

"What did she feel?" Basil Ransom asked, with the natural provokingness
of a man.

I know not whether Verena was provoked, but she answered with more
spirit than sequence: "Well, you know you _did_ pour contempt on us,
ever so much; I could see how it worked Olive up. Are you not going to
see her at all?"

"Well, I shall think about that; I am here only for three or four days,"
said Ransom, smiling as men smile when they are perfectly
unsatisfactory.

It is very possible that Verena was provoked, inaccessible as she was,
in a general way, to irritation; for she rejoined in a moment, with a
little deliberate air: "Well, perhaps it's as well you shouldn't go, if
you haven't changed at all."

"I haven't changed at all," said the young man, smiling still, with his
elbows on the arms of his chair, his shoulders pushed up a little, and
his thin brown hands interlocked in front of him.

"Well, I have had visitors who were quite opposed!" Verena announced, as
if such news could not possibly alarm her. Then she added, "How then did
you know I was out here?"

"Miss Birdseye told me."

"Oh, I am so glad you went to see _her_!" the girl cried, speaking again
with the impetuosity of a moment before.

"I didn't go to see he