Mattie looked steadily at him.
"You're paler than you used to be," she said after a while; "you're not like yourself; you've something on your mind."
Sidney frowned, rubbed his hair up the wrong way, after his father's fashion, cleared off suddenly and then laughed.
"Who hasn't?" was his reply.
"There's nothing which can't easily be got over, or my name isn't Mattie," said our heroine, with great firmness.
She was full of her one reason for all this thought on his side, and the confusion and perplexity on Harriet's, and she delivered her hint emphatically.
"I don't despair of getting over most things," he said, with a forced lightness that did not deceive his observer; "there's only one thing in the way that bothers me."
He said it more to himself than Mattie, who cried, instinctively—
"What's that, sir?"
"Why, that's my secret," he responded, shutting up on the instant; "and I shall keep it till the last."