d not--not----Elinor! not Phil
Compton, for goodness' sake? Don't tell me he's the man?"

Elinor's hands dropped from his arm. She drew herself up until she
seemed to tower over him. "And why should I say it is not Mr. Compton,"
she asked, with a scarlet flush of anger, so different from that rosy
red of love and happiness, covering her face.

"Phil Compton! the _dis_-Honourable Phil! Why, Elinor! you cannot mean
it! you must not mean it!" he cried.

Elinor said not a word. She turned from him with a look of pathetic
reproach but with the air of a queen, and walked into the house, he
following in a ferment of wrath and trouble, yet humbled and miserable
more than words could say. Oh, the flowery, peaceful house! jasmine and
rose overleaping each other upon the porch, honeysuckle scenting the
air, all manner of feminine contrivances to continue the greenness and
the sweetness into the little bright hall, into the open drawing-room,
where flowers stood on every table amid the hundred pretty trifles of a
woman's house. There was no one in this room where she led him, and then
turned round confronting him, taller than he had ever seen her before,
pale, with her nostrils dilating and her lips trembling. "I never
thought it possible that you of all people in the world, you, John--my
stand-by since ever I was a baby--my---- Oh! what a horrid thing it is
to be a woman," cried Elinor, stamping her foot, "to be ready to cry for
everything!--you, John! that I always put my trust in--that you should
turn against me--and at the very first word!"

"Elinor," he said, "my dear girl! not against you, not against you, for
all the world!"

"And what is _me_?" she said, with that sudden turning of the tables and
high scorn of her previous argument which is common with women; "do I
care what you do to _me_? Oh, nothing, nothing! I am of no account, you
can trample me down under your feet if you like. But what I will not
bear," she said, clenching her hands, "is injustice to him: that I will
not bear, neither from you, Cousin John, who are only my distant cousin,
after all, and have no right to thrust your advice upon me--or from any
one in the world."

"What you say is quite true, Elinor, I am only a distant cousin--after
all: but----"

"Oh, no, no," she cried, flying to him, seizing once more his arm with
her clinging hands, "I did not mean that--you know I did not mean that,
my more than brother, my good, good John, whom I have tr