Mistress Amanda turned impulsively. Her face had been carefully averted during this conversation, but now she let her eyes meet his. There was the emphasis of a kept-down excitement in her tone:
"Everybody except the one person who ought to know it. It is a well-kept secret so far as she's concerned."
"I've only been waiting for the right time—she's so young—such a child!" Things danced in the sunshine before the man's eyes. His long, lovely dream!—this was so sudden a call to hard reality; he could not waken in a minute.
"Nellie is not a girl to be won by accumulated acts of worship," said Mistress Amanda tersely. "Some girls can be won in that way; romantic girls. They would be flattered at being made the subject of verses; would like to feel that a great, powerful creature trembled before them. But Nellie is wonderfully free from that sort of vanity. So far from understanding the real feeling that is at the bottom of all the favors you show her she looks upon you as a sort of good godfather who has a fanciful, half-playful preference for her. You have never come near enough to her to touch the ruling motive of her character."
It sprang to Peter's lips to ask what that was; but he forbore the question. There seemed to him an indelicacy in arriving at a comprehension of his love through another person's perceptions, even if that person was her mother. Mistress Amanda, however, was no muddy stream whence truth must be laboriously filtered out, but a clear fountain, throwing facts high and rapidly in the air for the dullest seer to take in.
"She has a large vein of the practical in her. Probably you think—all you men think—that, with that soaring look, her feet never touch the ground. But you may take sentimental flights into the region of romance for the next ten years without interesting her enough to make her even look to see where you are. Don't woo her with poetry, my friend. She never reads it. I never saw her with any book of verse in her hand except a hymn-book."
A wild idea of putting his talent to this use came to Peter. After a moment's reflection he turned it out, as he would have locked his barn door against a suspicious steed bearing about him marks of gipsy ownership. And herein did my honest hero show his Dutch descent in his characteristic rejection of schemes out of the range of his natural inclination.
"I'm not much of a poet," he said, with an effort at a laugh.
"You look at things rather too much from a sentimental standpoint," observed Mistress Amanda. She had beaten the thistle quite to powder, and, laying down her whip, adjusted her gauntlets and gathered the reins into a firm grasp. Her fine black eyes had a singular expression.