"Except his brother Godfrey"—
"Except no one, Ruth, unless it's you. I'm neither persuasive nor kind, nor often with him. Proud of him I was, and never prouder than when I knew him to be furiously in love with her, while yet, for pure, sweet friendship's sake, he kept standing off, standing off."
"I wish you might have seen it, Godfrey. It was so beautiful—and so pitiful!"
"It was manly,—gentlemanly; and that was enough. Then all at once he's taken aback! All control of himself gone, all self-suppression, all conscience"—
"The conscience has returned," said the girl.
"Oh, not to guide him! Only to goad him! Fifty consciences can't honorably undo the mischief now!"
"Did I not write you that there was already, then, a coolness between her and Leonard?"
"Yes; but the whole bigness and littleness of Arthur's small, bad deed lies in the fact that, though he knew that coolness was but a momentary tiff, with Isabel in the wrong, he took advantage of it to push his suit in between and spoil as sweet a match as two hearts were ever making."
"It was more than a tiff, Godfrey; it"—
"Not a bit more! not—a—bit!"