She blushed very deeply, and cast a wondering glance up at him, astonished at his penetration. ‘I did not say so,’ she cried. ‘I am not disappointed--only one did not think of all the details. Real things are never so beautiful as things are in your imagination, that is all.’ ‘Is it always so?’ he said, stealing always a little further on. ‘For then this world would be a sadly unsatisfactory place, and life would not be worth living.’ ‘Ah, everybody says so,’ cried Agnes; ‘that is what I always rebel against. Because one thing disappoints you, why should everything? They say the world is so bad, all full of delusion; but God made it--it cannot be so bad if we took pains enough to find out what is best.’ Oswald’s heart was touched; by the eagerness in her face and the beauty of its dimples--but a little by the contrast between this young creature’s abstract purpose and his own want of any purpose at all. ‘I am not good enough to keep up such an argument,’ he said ingenuously enough; ‘I am afraid I am content to get along just as it happens from day to day. You make me blush for myself.’ When he said this an overpowering blush covered the face which was turned towards him under the poke-bonnet. ‘Oh, what have I been saying?’ she cried, crimson with shame and compunction. How she had been talking to a stranger, a man, a person whose very name she did not know! What would the Sisters say, what would mamma say if she knew? Would not this heinous offence against all the proprieties prove everything they had ever said against her independent outset in the world? And he, what could he think? Agnes wished the pavement might open and swallow her up--as it had done once or twice before at very great crises of history. She could not run away from him, that would be a worse folly still, especially as the ‘House’ was already in sight. But she shrank away from him as far as the narrow pavement would permit, and did not dare to look at him again.