"She will think I am common," she moaned, "and I am not common! Why did I say such things? It is not my way of talking. Why did I criticise the way the portrait was hung? And she will think this is what I really am, and it is not what I am! She will think I do not even know how to sit in a chair, and she will tell Dent, and Dent will believe her, and what will become of me?"
"Pansy," said Dent next afternoon, as they were in the woods together, "you have won my mother's heart."
"Oh, Dent," she exclaimed, tears starting, "I was afraid she would not like me. How could she like me, knowing me no better?"
"She doesn't yet know that she likes you," he replied, with his honest thinking and his honest speech, "but I can see that she trusts you and respects you; and with my mother everything else follows in time."
"I was embarrassed. I did myself such injustice."
"It is something you never did any one else."
He had been at work in his quarry on the vestiges of creation; the quarry lay at an outcrop of that northern hill overlooking the valley in which she lived. Near by was a woodland, and she had come out for some work of her own in which he guided her. They lay on the grass now side by side.
"I am working on the plan of our house, Pansy. I expect to begin to build in the autumn. I have chosen this spot for the site. How do you like it?"
"I like it very well. For one reason, I can always see the old place from it."
"My father left his estate to be equally divided between Rowan and me. Of course he could not divide the house; that goes to Rowan: it is a good custom for this country as it was a good custom for our forefathers in England. But I get an equivalent and am to build for myself on this part of the land: my portion is over here. You see we have always been divided only by a few fences and they do not divide at all."