"I am afraid — you don't know me."
"I don't know," said he smiling. "You haven't told me anything new yet."
"I am afraid you think of me, somehow, better than I deserve."
"What is the remedy for that?"
Elizabeth hesitated, with an instant's vexed consciousness of his provoking coolness; then looking up met his eye for a second, laughed, and went on perfectly contented. But she wondered with a little secret mortification, that Winthrop was as perfectly at home and at his ease in the newly established relations between them as if they had subsisted for six months. "Is it nothing new to him?" she said to herself. "Did he know that it only depended on him to speak? — or is it his way with all the world?" It was not that she was undervalued, or slightly regarded, but valued and regarded with such unchanged self-possession. Meanwhile they reached the edge of the woodland, from which the house and garden were to be seen close at hand.
"Stay here," said Winthrop; — "I will carry this basket in and let them know you may be expected to breakfast."
"But if you do that, —" said Elizabeth colouring —
"What then?"
"I don't know what they will think."
"They may think what they have a mind," said he with a little bit of a smile again. "I want to speak to you."