ring ones. She had pleased him, and he had tried to amuse her
in a careless, well-meant fashion, though he had never made fine
speeches to her, as nine men out of ten would have done. He had been so
used to Priscilla, that it never occurred to him that a girl so young as
this one could be a woman. And, after all, his blindness had not been
the result of any frivolous lack of thought. A sharp experience had made
him as thoroughly a man of the world as a man may be; but it had not
made him callous or indifferent to the beauties of life. No one would
ever have called him emotional, or prone to enthusiasms of a weak kind,
and yet he was by no means hard of heart. He had quiet fancies of his
own about people and things, and many of these reticent,
rarely-expressed ideas were reverent, chivalrous ones of women. The
opposing force of a whole world could never have shaken his faith in
Priscilla Gower, or touched his respect for her; but though, perhaps, he
had never understood it so, he had never felt very enthusiastically
concerning her. Truly, Priscilla Gower and enthusiasm were not in
accordance with each other. Chance had thrown them together when both
were very young, and propinquity did the rest. Propinquity is the
strongest of agents in a love affair, and in Denis Oglethorpe's love
affair, propinquity had accomplished what nothing else would have been
likely to have done. The desperate young scribbler of twenty years had
been the lodger of the elder Miss Gower, and Priscilla, aged seventeen,
had brought in his frugal dinners to him, and receipted his modest bills
on their weekly payment.

Priscilla at seventeen, silent, practical, grave and handsome, had,
perhaps, softened unconsciously at the sight of his often pale face--he
worked so hard and so far into the night; when at length they became
friends, Priscilla gravely, and without any hesitation, volunteered to
help him. She could copy well and clearly, and he could come into her
aunt's room--it would save fires. So she helped him calmly and
decorously, bending her almost austerely-handsome young head over his
papers for hours on the long winter nights. It is easy to guess how the
matter terminated. If ever he won success he determined to give it to
Priscilla--and so he told her. He had never wavered in his faith for a
second since, though he had encountered many beautiful and womanly
women. He had worked steadily for her sake, and shielded her from every
care that it