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Finally, with a vague idea of a compromise between the impossible alternative of making love to her, which he could n’t, and seeming an insensible boor, which he wouldn’t, he laid his disengaged hand upon hers as it rested on his arm. It was his intention to apply to it a gentle pressure, which, while committing him to nothing, might tend to calm her feelings and by its vaguely reassuring influence help to stave off a crisis for the remainder of their walk. He did not, however, succeed in carrying out the scheme; for at the moment of contact her hand eluded his, as quicksilver glides from the grasp. There was no hint of coquettish hesitation in its withdrawal. She snatched it away as if his touch had burned her; and although she did not at the same time wholly relinquish his arm, that was doubtless to avoid making the situation, on the street as they were, too awkward.

A moment before only concerned to evade her apparent advances, Arthur found himself in the position of one under rebuke for offering an unwarranted familiarity to a lady. There was no question that he had utterly misconstrued her previous conduct. It was very strange that he could have been such a fool; but he was quite too dazed to disentangle the evidence just then, and there was no doubt about the fact.

“Pardon me,” he stammered, too much overcome with confusion and chagrin to be able to judge whether it would have been better to be silent.

The quickness with which the reply came showed that she had been on the point of speaking herself.

“You need not ask my pardon,” she said. Her tones quivered with excitement and her utterance was low and swift. “I don’t blame you in the least, after the way I have talked to you to-night. But I did not mean that you should think lightly of me. I have said nothing right, nothing that I meant to. What I wanted to have you understand was that I care for you very much.” Her voice broke here, but she caught her breath and went right on. “I wanted you to know it somehow, and since I could not make you know it by ways clever girls might, I thought I would tell you plainly. It really amounts to the same thing; don’t you think so? and I know you ‘ll keep my secret. You need n’t say anything. I know you ‘ve nothing to say and may never have. That makes no difference. You owe me nothing merely because I care for you. Don’t pity me. I’m not so much ashamed as you ‘d suppose. It all seems so natural when it’s once said. You need n’t be afraid of me. I shall never say this again or trouble you at all. Only be a little good to me; that’s all.”

She delivered this little speech almost in one breath, with headlong, explosive utterance, as if it were something she had to go through with, cost what it might, and only wanted somehow to get out the words, regardless, for the time, of their manner or effect. She ended with an hysterical sob, and Arthur felt her hand tremble on his arm as she struggled with an emotion that threatened to overcome her. But it was over almost instantly; and without giving him a chance to speak, she exclaimed, with an entire alteration of tone and manner:–

“Did you see that article in the ‘Gazette’ this morning about the craze for collecting pottery which has broken out in the big cities? Do you suppose it will reach here? What do you think of it?”

Now it was perfectly true, as she had told him, that Arthur had nothing whatever to say in response to the declaration she had made; but all the same it is possible, if she had not just so abruptly diverted the conversation, that he would then and there have placed himself and all his worldly goods at her disposal. He would have done this, although five minutes before he had had no more notion of marrying her than the Emperor of China’s daughter, merely because every manly instinct cried out against permitting a nice girl to protest her partiality for him without meeting her half-way. Afterward, when he realized how near he had come to going over the verge of matrimony, it was with such reminiscent terror as chills the blood of the awakened sleep-walker looking up at the dizzy ridge-pole he has trodden with but a hair’s breadth between him and eternity.