"You like the country?"
"Yes, I love it. There is a rest, a calm about it that to some seems monotony, but to me is peace."
A rather troubled shade falls across her face. An intense pity for her fills Cyril's breast together with a growing conviction (which is not a pleasing one) that the dead and gone Arlington must have been a king among his fellows.
"I like the country well enough myself," he says, "but I hardly hold it in such esteem as you do. It is slow,—at times unbearable. Indeed, a careful study of my feelings has convinced me that I prefer the strains of Albani or Nilsson to those of the sweetest nightingale that ever 'warbled at eve,' and the sound of the noisiest cab to the bleating of the melancholy lamb; while the most exquisite sunrise that could be worked into poetry could not tempt me from my bed. Have I disgusted you?"
"I wonder you are not ashamed to give way to such sentiments,"—with a short but lovely smile.
"One should never be ashamed of telling the truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be."
"True!" with another smile, more prolonged, and therefore lovelier, that lights up all her face and restores to it the sweetness and freshness of a child's.
Cyril, looking at her, forgets the thread of his discourse, and says impulsively, as though speaking to himself, "It seems impossible."
"What does?" somewhat startled.
"Forgive me; I was again going to say something that would undoubtedly have brought down your heaviest displeasure on my head."