f
these girls in their assessment of the value of lovers' vows. And still
more easily that--some three years later than the girlish jest related a
page since--when Maisie, playing off this trick on a wild young son of
the Squire's, was met by an indignant reproach for her attempted
deception, she should have been touched by his earnestness and seeming
insight into her inner soul, and that the incident should have become
the cornerstone of a fatal passion for a damned scoundrel. "Oh,
Maisie--Maisie!"--thus ran his protestation--"Dearest, best, sweetest of
girls, how can you think to dupe me when your voice goes to my heart as
no other voice ever can--ever will? How, when I know you for mine--mine
alone--by touch, by sight, by hearing?" The poor child's innocent little
fraud had been tried on a past-master in deception, and her own arrow
glanced back to wound her, beyond cure perhaps. His duplicity was proved
afterwards by the confession of his elder brother Ralph, a young man
little better than himself, that the two girls had been the subject of a
wager between them, which he had lost. This wager turned on which of the
two should be first "successful" with one of the beautiful twins; and
whether it showed only doubtful taste or infamous bad feeling depended
on what interpretation was put on the word "success" by its
perpetrators. A lenient one was possible so long as no worse came of it
than that Thornton Daverill, the younger brother, became the accepted
suitor of Maisie, and Ralph, the elder, the rejected one of Phoebe.
Thornton's success was no doubt due in a great measure to Maisie's
failure to mislead him about her identity, and Ralph's rejection
possibly to the poor figure he cut when Phoebe played fast and loose
with hers. That there was no truth or honour in Thornton's protestations
to Maisie, or even honest loss of self-control under strong feeling, is
evident from the fact that he told his brother as a good joke that his
power of distinguishing between the girls was due to nothing more
profound than that Maisie always gave him her hand to shake and Phoebe
only her fingers. Possibly this test would only have held good in the
case of men outside the family. It was connected with some minute
sensitiveness of feeling towards that class, not perceptible by any
other.

But in whatever sense Thornton and Maisie were trothplight, her father
opposed their marriage, although it would no doubt have been a social
elevatio