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Not only in this respect, but also in the singular frankness which marked their interchange of thought and opinion, was there something in their relation savoring of that of brother and sister. It was as if her confession of love had swept away by one breath the whole lattice of conventional affectations through which young men and women usually talk with each other. Once for all she had dropped her guard with him, and he could not do less with her. He found himself before long talking more freely to her than to any others of his acquaintance, and about more serious matters. They talked of their deepest beliefs and convictions, and he told her things that he had never told any one before. Why should he not tell her his secrets? Had she not told him hers? It was a pleasure to reciprocate her confidence if he could not her love. He had not supposed it to be possible for a man to become so closely acquainted with a young lady not a relative. It came to the point finally that when they met in company, the few words that he might chance to exchange with her were pitched in a different key from that used with the others, such as one drops into when greeting a relative or familiar friend met in a throng of strangers.

Of course, all this had not come at once. It was in winter that the events took place with which this narrative opened. Winter had meantime glided into spring, and spring had become summer. In the early part of June a report that Arthur Burton and Maud Elliott were engaged obtained circulation, and, owing to the fact that he had so long been apparently devoted to her, was generally believed. Whenever Maud went out she met congratulations on every side, and had to reply a dozen times a day that there was no truth in the story, and smilingly declare that she could not imagine how it started. After doing which, she would go home and cry all night, for Arthur was not only not engaged to her, but she had come to know in her heart that he never would be.

At first, and indeed for a long time, she was so proud of the frank and loyal friendship between them, such as she was sure had never before existed between unplighted man and maid, that she would have been content to wait half her lifetime for him to learn to love her, if only she were sure that he would at last. But, after all, it was the hope of his love, not his friendship, that had been the motive of her desperate venture. As month after month passed, and he showed no symptoms of any feeling warmer than esteem, but always in the midst of his cordiality was so careful lest he should do or say anything to arouse unfounded expectations in her mind, she lost heart and felt that what she had hoped was not to be. She said to herself that the very fact that he was so much her friend should have warned her that he would never be her lover, for it is not often that lovers are made out of friends.

It is always embarrassing for a young lady to have to deny a report of her engagement, especially when it is a report she would willingly have true; but what made it particularly distressing for Maud that this report should have got about was her belief that it would be the means of bringing to an end the relations between them. It would undoubtedly remind Arthur, by showing how the public interpreted their friendship, that his own prospects in other quarters, and he might even think justice to her future, demanded the discontinuance of attentions which must necessarily be misconstrued by the world. The public had been quite right in assuming that it was time for them to be engaged. Such an intimacy as theirs between a young man and a young woman, unless it were to end in an engagement, had no precedent and belonged to no known social category. It was vain, in the long run, to try to live differently from other people.