As they both stood in the full light of the window, the young man somehow seemed to miss that yielding softness in her face which had lulled his sense and fired his senses in the misleading shadows of the curtain. It was still a very beautiful face, but there was a great deal of self-possession in it. Perhaps it would be as well just now to go no further.
“We must try to live up to your good opinion, and your kindly forecast,” he said, as he momentarily touched the hand she offered him. “You cannot possibly imagine how glad I am to have braved the conventionalities in calling, and to have found you at home. It has transformed the rural Sunday from a burden into a beatitude.”
“How pretty, Mr. Boyce! Is there any message for mamma?”
“Oh, why did you say that?” He ventured upon a tone of mock vexation. “I wanted so much to go away with the fancy that this was an enchanted palace, and that you were shut up alone in it, waiting for—”
“Tuesdays, from two till five,” she broke in, with a bow, in the same spirit of amiable raillery, and so he said good-by and made his way out.
Had he succeeded? Was there a promise of success? Horace took a long walk before he finally turned his steps homeward, and pondered these problems excitedly in his mind. On the whole, he concluded that he could win her. That she was for herself better worth the winning than even for her million, he said to himself over and over again with rapture.
Miss Kate went up-stairs and into the sitting-room common to the sisters, in which Ethel lay on the sofa in front of the fire-place. She knelt beside this sofa, and held her hands over the subdued flame of the maple sticks on the hearth.
“It is so cold down in the parlor,” she remarked, by way of explanation.
“He stayed an unconscionable while,” said Ethel. “What could he have talked about? I had almost a mind to waive my headache and come down to find out. It was a full hour.”