enly I glanced up and our eyes met, and--He says it was the
sauciness of my dimples (oh, those old dimples! they seem to have stood
me in good stead after all); but I say it was my sincere affection which
drew him, for he stooped like a man forgetful of everything in the whole
wide world but the little trembling, panting being before him, and gave
me one of those caresses which seals a woman's fate forever, and made
me, the feather-brained and thoughtless coquette, a slave to this
large-minded and true-hearted man for all my life hereafter.

Why I should be so happy over this event is beyond my understanding.
That he should be in the seventh heaven of delight is only to be
expected, but that I should find myself tripping through this gloomy old
house like one treading on air is a mystery, to the elucidation of which
I can only give my dimples. My reason can make nothing out of it. I, who
thought of nothing short of a grand establishment in Boston, money,
servants, and a husband who would love me blindly whatever my faults,
have given my troth--you will say my lips, but the one means the
other--to a man who will never be known outside of his own county, never
be rich, never be blind even, for he frowns upon me as often as he
smiles, and, worst of all, who lives in a house so vast and so full of
tragic suggestion that it might well awaken doleful anticipations in
much more serious-minded persons than myself.

And yet I am happy, so happy that I have even attempted to make the
acquaintance of the grim old portraits and weak pastels which line the
walls of many of these bedrooms. Old Mr. Knollys caught me courtesying
just now before one of these ancestral beauties, whose face seemed to
hold a faint prophecy of my own, and perceiving by my blushes that this
was something more than a mere childish freak on my part, he chucked me
under the chin and laughingly asked, how long it was likely to be before
he might have the honor of adding my pretty face to the collection.
Which should have made me indignant, only I am not in an indignant mood
just now.

* * * * *

Why have I been so foolish? Why did I not let my over-fond neighbor know
from the beginning that I detested him, instead of--But what have I done
anyway? A smile, a nod, a laughing word mean nothing. When one has eyes
which persist in dancing in spite of one's every effort to keep them
demure, men who become fools are apt to call one a c