During this lame performance Miss Farington listened with a perfectly stolid face, but with a heightened colour which told that she knew, in vulgar parlance, what I was driving at. Now that I was coming to the point, however, she did not mean to have any 'humbugging about.' At least, some such determination as that, rather than maiden coyness, seemed to prompt her next speech. 'I don't _think_ I quite understand you, Mr. Maude.' This was a challenge. I took it up. 'I think, Miss Farington, you must have noticed my growing interest in----' 'In my plans? No, indeed I haven't. Don't you remember your saying the other day that it seemed a pity to waste good drainage and sanitary regulations upon people who were never ill?' 'I--I only mean that my interest in--er--in drainage was swallowed up in my interest in you.' It was the very last way in which I should have chosen to introduce a declaration of love, but with a girl too much absorbed in the progress of humanity to encourage that of the individual man, there is nothing for you but to take what opening you can get. It was all right, at any rate, for she smiled and gave me her hand, the glove of which I respectfully kissed, noticing at the time that it smelt of treacle, and wondering how it had acquired that particular perfume. It occurred to me, even as I stood there trying to think of something to say, that the little boys she had been teaching must have been eating bread and treacle, and imparted its fragrance to their lesson-books. 'You have surprised me very much, Mr. Maude,' she said. 'Are you quite sure that I deserve this honour?' Perhaps the question was not so insincere as it seemed to me, for she looked pleased, though not at all agitated. But I felt, as I reassured her with some conventional words, that my heart would have gone out more to the emptiest-headed little fool that ever giggled and blushed than to this most intelligent and matter-of-fact young woman. And I fell to wondering, as we began to walk back together, why the sentimental and the practical were so oddly divided in the feminine mind that a girl could glow with enthusiasm while talking about impracticable plans for making her neighbours uncomfortable, and listen quite coolly to a proposal to pass her life with the man she had made no secret of liking best. I had an awkward sense of not knowing what to talk about, and I asked her how she liked Larkhall. She had evidently considered that matter well already, and was quite prepared with her answer. 'I think it only wants the south wing raised a storey, and the drawing-room enlarged by taking in that space between the outer wall and that row of lilacs and guelderroses at the back, to make it one of the pleasantest of the country houses about here,' she replied promptly. I felt a cold shiver up my back, perceiving that even my study might be already doomed.