and unheard of all my
days; and in that case no one but myself will know the visions of
greatness I have stifled and buried."

"Why do you talk of being poor and unheard of? Aren't you getting on
quite well in this city?"

This question of Verena's left him no time, or at least no coolness, to
remember that to Mrs. Luna and to Olive he had put a fine face on his
prospects, and that any impression the girl might have about them was
but the natural echo of what these ladies believed. It had to his ear
such a subtly mocking, defiant, unconsciously injurious quality, that
the only answer he could make to it seemed to him for the moment to be
an outstretched arm, which, passing round her waist, should draw her so
close to him as to enable him to give her a concise account of his
situation in the form of a deliberate kiss. If the moment I speak of had
lasted a few seconds longer I know not what monstrous proceeding of this
kind it would have been my difficult duty to describe; it was
fortunately arrested by the arrival of a nursery-maid pushing a
perambulator and accompanied by an infant who toddled in her wake. Both
the nurse and her companion gazed fixedly, and it seemed to Ransom even
sternly, at the striking couple on the bench; and meanwhile Verena,
looking with a quickened eye at the children (she adored children), went
on--

"It sounds too flat for you to talk about your remaining unheard of. Of
course you are ambitious; any one can see that, to look at you. And once
your ambition is excited in any particular direction, people had better
look out. With your will!" she added, with a curious mocking candour.

"What do you know about my will?" he asked, laughing a little awkwardly,
as if he had really attempted to kiss her--in the course of the second
independent interview he had ever had with her--and been rebuffed.

"I know it's stronger than mine. It made me come out, when I thought I
had much better not, and it keeps me sitting here long after I should
have started for home."

"Give me the day, dear Miss Tarrant, give me the day," Basil Ransom
murmured; and as she turned her face upon him, moved by the expression
of his voice, he added--"Come and dine with me, since you wouldn't
lunch. Are you really not faint and weak?"

"I am faint and weak at all the horrible things you have said; I have
lunched on abominations. And now you want me to dine with you? Thank
you; I think you're cool!" Verena cried, with a lau