"I don't say it wouldn't," returned Mordaunt, quick enough to see that frankness was his best policy. "I'm not going to tell a lot of humbug about my heart being broken, which you wouldn't believe. Of course, I have flirted a good deal. A guardsman of eight-and-twenty must have had some affairs. You wouldn't believe me if I said I hadn't. But I have never been hard hit till now. I am honestly and heartily in love with you. I think you are the dearest girl in the world, and I shall go on persevering as long as I see you don't prefer another fellow. If you do, I shall be awfully cut up, though I shall try and prevent the world's seeing it; and, I suppose, in the course of time, I shall marry some one else, who throws her cap at me. She'll have to make the running. I sha'n't be a bit in love."
"Mamma says love is not necessary at first—that it grows and strengthens after marriage—that violent fancies are seldom lasting."
"You run no danger of that kind, apparently," was his reproachful reply. "You speak as if you had no heart."
"I don't know if I have one, or not. If I was sure I had, I would marry the man right away who made me sure. And when I feel sure I have not, I shall marry—well, I suppose any one."
"For ambition?"
"Perhaps."
There was a long silence. Irrepressible, "bumptious," as he was often called, Mordaunt Ballinger on this occasion was reduced to silence. His eyes bent upon the ground, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his ulster, he kicked the fir-cones with his yellow leather boots as they paced the wood, while the girl, erect, keen-sighted, with a brilliant color on her fair cheek, glanced at him from time to time, and then away through the red-stemmed pines to where the blue smoke curled up from the chimneys of the house.
It was she who spoke first.
"Where are you going after Boston?"
"To Colorado. And you? Do you remain at Pittsburgh till the spring?"