Ah! So I had got him to speak his mind at last, his own mind that he would have given anything not to have revealed to any employee! More than that, I’d driven him into being inexcusably rude to a woman. His face, where the tan had deepened to a sullen red, his lips, compressed into what seemed like a thin, pen-drawn line, showed me that _he_ had realized this. _I_ don’t mean him to forget what he said. I said nothing. The most awkward of all the many awkward pauses so far, elapsed between us as we walked along, and before he spoke again. When he did, I saw that it cost him more than he liked me to notice. “Yes. You see—I ought not to have said that. I beg your pardon.” “Oh! Please don’t! I didn’t mind it at all,” said I, better able to speak very sweetly now that I felt I had regained some of my ascendancy. But all the fun of “scoring” off him had gone, though I must not let him see that. “Of course you’ve every right to say exactly what you think, just as Theo does.” For his face, still flushed, ruffled, and without a trace of the “office-mask,” wore a fleeting but quite laughable likeness to his youngest sister’s. I have heard it said of some girl, “She isn’t pretty exactly, but she has pretty looks,” and positively, if I didn’t dislike him so intensely, I should say that the Governor, though never handsome, has “handsome looks” himself. I went on, still mildly: “Only, you know, Theo and Blanche and your mother don’t happen to think—what you’ve just said. They seem to consider that—well! that the man I was engaged to isn’t—wouldn’t be at all to be _pitied_!” “I know. You needn’t tell me that. You have contrived to make all three of them ridic—extremely fond of you!” This resentfully, realizing it as part of my insolence to him. “My mother and the girls don’t see through it, when you are—are covertly reminding me, in a hundred small ways, of what I don’t need to be reminded of. _That_ would be all right, therefore—only——Other people who came to the house might not be so unsuspecting _They_ might chance to notice that there was something odd—unusual—unnatural in your attitude to me.” “But—but you said any strangeness would be put down to the awkwardness of a girl so recently engaged?” “No one would give _you_ much credit for being ‘awkward!’” Still more resentfully. “And something might come out. That is why I am obliged to ask you to be a little more guarded.” “‘More guarded,’” I repeated meekly, like a child who is learning by heart. “Yes. I must. I must try harder to make it seem less ‘unnatural’ that we two should be engaged.” Again the look, instantly banished, that meant he pined to shake me. “Thank you,” he said. “And by the ‘other people,’ I suppose you mean this other—outspoken Mr. Waters who is coming over to ‘inspect’ me? Do you think—are you afraid that _he_ will be sorry for the man who is supposed to be engaged to me?” Under his breath Mr. William Waters muttered what _sounded_, at least, like the one word, “IMP!”