"I have thought so," returned Helen, with assumed loftiness, "for thirty or forty years."
"So long?" queried Smith, thoughtfully. "That merely goes to show how one can be deceived."
"Deceived!" said Miss Maitland. "Unless you mean self-deception, I would like an explanation of that remark."
But her visitor said that in his opinion to explain anything, however occult, to a Bostonian, savored of intellectual impudence, and was, at the least, a piece of presumption of which he hoped he should never be guilty.
"And yet I can remember," said the girl, laughing, "an occasion when explanations were made to a young lady from Boston—and explanations that took some time, too. I—even I—can bear witness to that."
"My life," Smith rejoined, "has been like that of a candidate for office, such that he who runs may read—and he need not necessarily be a ten-second sprinter, either. Only one dark, shameful page is in it, and that is the record of the day when I talked deaf, dumb, and blind the helpless stranger within the Guardian's gates."
"Are you really sorry?" Helen asked more seriously.
Smith looked at her.
"It has been more than three months since you left New York," he said.
"I have been glad of it—and sorry for it—every day of that time."
"And which are you now?" inquired the girl, with interest.