"Please, Mr. Winthrop, I cannot tell you all my thoughts. They are surely my own, and cannot be torn from me ruthlessly."
"What sort of persons are you meeting now at your Mill Road Mission?"
He suddenly changed the conversation, to my intense relief.
"The very same that I have met all along, with the exception of the Sykes family—they are a new experience."
"Were you thinking of any one you know there just now, that caused your inattention?"
"Why, certainly not, Mr. Winthrop. I do not care so very much for them as that."
He was silent for a good while, in one of his abstracted moods; and, thinking the lesson was over for that day, I was about to leave the room. He arose, and, going to the window, stood looking out into the night—I quietly watching him, and wondering of what he was so busily thinking. Presently he turned, and, coming to the table where I was sitting, stood looking down intently at me.
"Medoline, has it ever occurred to you that you are an unusually attractive bit of womanhood?"
I drew back almost as if he had struck me a blow. He smiled.
"You are as odd as you are fascinating," he said.