"Out of my debt, Mr. Maitland?" taking the gloves mechanically.
"Please. Did you think I had forgotten? I should find it hard to do that," he continued, encouraged and relieved by having got rid of the gloves, and inattentive at the moment to her face. Yet she looked long at him searchingly.
"I have found it hard to understand you," she said at last, with repressed anger in voice and eye; "very hard, Mr. Maitland; but I think I do so now. Do you believe that it was I who kissed you when you were asleep on Wednesday afternoon? Can you think so? You force me to presume it is so. Your estimate of my modesty and of your own deserts must differ considerably. I had not the honor. Your gloves"--and she dropped them upon the floor as if the touch contaminated her, the act humiliating the young gentleman at least as much as her words--"you had better give to Agnes, if you wish to observe a silly custom. They are due to her, not to me. I thank you, Mr. Maitland, for having compelled me to give this pleasant explanation."
She turned away with a gesture of such queenly contempt that our poor hero--now most unheroic, and dumb as Carlyle would have had his, only with mortification and intense disgust at his stupidity--amazed that he could ever have thought meanly of this girl, "who moved most certainly a goddess," had not a word to express his sorrow. A hero utterly crestfallen! But at the door she looked back, for some strange reason known perchance to female readers. The gloves were on the floor, just beyond his reach--poor, forlorn, sprawling objects, their fingers and palms spread as in ridiculous appeal. As for him, he was lying back on the sofa, in appearance so crushed and helpless that the woman's pity ever near her eyes moved her. She went slowly back, and picked up the gloves, and put them on the table where he could take them.
"Miss Joan," he said, in a tone of persistence that claimed a hearing, and, starting far from the immediate trouble, was apt to arouse curiosity; "we are always, as Agnes says, jangling--on my side, of course, is the false note. Can we not accord better, and be better friends?"
"Not until we learn to know one another better," she said coldly, looking down at him, "or become more discerning judges."
"I was a fool, an idiot, an imbecile!" She nodded gravely, still regarding him from a great height. "I was mad to believe it possible!"
"I think we may be better friends," she responded, smiling faintly, yet with sudden good humor. "We are beginning to know--one another."
"And ourselves," almost under his breath. Then, "Miss Joan, will you ever forgive me? I shall never err again in that direction," he pleaded. "I am humiliated in my own eyes until you tell me it is forgotten."
She nodded, and this time with her own frank smile.