I had a shrewd suspicion that Bridget was always dogging my footsteps, and once or twice I surprised a flitting figure disappearing round the piazza when Captain Holford walked home with me, but as she never ventured to remonstrate openly, I did not suppose she would presume to write about me to mamma. This went on for six glorious days, and we talked of everything on earth, and even exchanged views of the trans-celestial, and the rest of the time we talked of ourselves, and again of ourselves. He drew from me my thoughts and hopes, the monotonous story of a sheltered girl’s life, and the shrinking and longing--so oddly mixed--with which she viewed the impending future; and in return he talked much of his feelings, but little of his past, though vaguely I guessed that a great financial change had come to him not very long ago, and I understood how painful explanations might be, and admired his uncomplaining courage. At our last meeting, for he was going away the next day, we discussed that burning question of what an enlightened conscience owes to others--to prejudice and class distinction as against its larger usefulness and happiness. We were seated near the top of a sand dune with the Atlantic murmuring at our feet, and behind us the merry little village settling down to rest after the labors of the day. Mr. Holford had been talking of youth, its sensuous keenness to pain or pleasure, and saying that worldly prudence meant sacrificing life at its flood of physical development to the dreary protection of its decay. “We must go hungry,” he concluded, disdainfully, “while we have the teeth to eat, in order that our mumbling old age may be regaled with banquets it is past enjoying.” His reasoning seemed to me fallacious. “If youth is restrained,” I said, “it is only in the cause of self-respect. What civilized being wishes to be a burden to others?” “Civilization means hardened selfishness,” he said. “It conjugates all its tenses with _to have_, seldom with _to be_.” I asked myself whether this bitterness was a protest against the social barrier between us, and I said, reproachfully: “I don’t like you in this mood. You are hard.” “The sordid side of life has been thrust upon me,” he said, sadly. “I have known poverty and riches, and I have suffered almost as much from one as the other, till I hate such influences. Why, even you--a girl of twenty--would deny your best impulses if you fell in love with a man below you in position. Look into my eyes and tell me if I have guessed the truth?” I looked into his eyes and saw something that made the color mount to my cheeks and set my heart thumping. “A girl doesn’t own her own life, Mr. Holford,” I managed to answer. “She only owns a little part of herself called her heart, and that seems of small consequence to her elders.”