ent that the girl instinctively placed her own in
it. So, hand in hand, for some moments, these two young women sat
looking at each other. "There is so much I want to ask you," said Olive.

"Well, I can't say much except when father has worked on me," Verena
answered with an ingenuousness beside which humility would have seemed
pretentious.

"I don't care anything about your father," Olive Chancellor rejoined
very gravely, with a great air of security.

"He is very good," Verena said simply. "And he's wonderfully magnetic."

"It isn't your father, and it isn't your mother; I don't think of them,
and it's not them I want. It's only you--just as you are."

Verena dropped her eyes over the front of her dress. "Just as she was"
seemed to her indeed very well.

"Do you want me to give up----?" she demanded, smiling.

Olive Chancellor drew in her breath for an instant, like a creature in
pain; then, with her quavering voice, touched with a vibration of
anguish, she said; "Oh, how can I ask you to give up? _I_ will give
up--I will give up everything!"

Filled with the impression of her hostess's agreeable interior, and of
what her mother had told her about Miss Chancellor's wealth, her
position in Boston society, Verena, in her fresh, diverted scrutiny of
the surrounding objects, wondered what could be the need of this scheme
of renunciation. Oh no, indeed, she hoped she wouldn't give up--at least
not before she, Verena, had had a chance to see. She felt, however, that
for the present there would be no answer for her save in the mere
pressure of Miss Chancellor's eager nature, that intensity of emotion
which made her suddenly exclaim, as if in a nervous ecstasy of
anticipation, "But we must wait! Why do we talk of this? We must wait!
All will be right," she added more calmly, with great sweetness.

Verena wondered afterward why she had not been more afraid of her--why,
indeed, she had not turned and saved herself by darting out of the room.
But it was not in this young woman's nature to be either timid or
cautious; she had as yet to make acquaintance with the sentiment of
fear. She knew too little of the world to have learned to mistrust
sudden enthusiasms, and if she had had a suspicion it would have been
(in accordance with common worldly knowledge) the wrong one--the
suspicion that such a whimsical liking would burn itself out. She could
not have that one, for there was a light in Miss Chancellor's magnified
face