It is hard enough to have a woman like that think it, who
ought to know better, who has always known me--but you, John!"

"You may be sure, Elinor, that I did not put it on that ground."

"No, perhaps: but on ground not much more respectful to me--perhaps that
I have been fascinated by a handsome man, which is not considered
derogatory. Oh, John, a girl does not give herself away on an argument
like that. I may be hasty and self-willed and impatient, as you say; but
when you--love!" Her face flushed like a rose, so that even in the grey
of the evening it shone out like one of the clouds full of sunset that
still lingered on the sky. A few quick tears followed, the natural
consequence of her emotion. And then she turned to him with the ineffable
condescension of one farther advanced in life stooping sweetly to his
ignorance. "You have not yet come to the moment in your experience when
you can understand that, dear John."

Oh, the insight and the ignorance, the knowledge and the absence of all
perception! He, too, laughed out, as she had done, with a sense of the
intolerable ridicule and folly and mistake. "Perhaps that's how it is,"
he said.

Elinor looked at him gravely, in an elder-sisterly, profoundly-investigating
way, and then she took his arm quietly and turned towards home. "I shall
forget what you have said, and you will forget that you ever said it;
and now we will go home, John, and be just the same dear friends as
before."

"Will you promise me," he said, "that whatever happens, without pride,
or recollection of what I've been so foolish as to say, in any need
or emergency, or whenever you want anything, or if you should be in
trouble--trouble comes to everybody in this life--you will remember what
you have said just now, and send for your cousin John?"

Her whole face beamed out in one smile, she clasped her other hand
round his arm; "I should have done it without being asked, without ever
doubting for a moment, because it was the most natural thing in the
world. Whom should I turn to else if not to my dear old---- But call me
Nelly, John."

"Dear little Nelly!" he said with faltering voice, "then that is a
bargain."

She held up her cheek to him, and he kissed it solemnly in the shadow of
the little young oak that fluttered its leaves wistfully in the breeze
that was getting up--and then very soberly, saying little, they walked
back to the cottage. He was going abroad for his vacation, not saying to