Guy watched her closely without seeming to do so, mentally deciding that she was neither vulgar nor awkward. On the contrary, he thought her very pretty, and very graceful, for one so unaccustomed to society. Nothing was said to Agnes, who kept her room the entire day, and did not join the family until evening, when Guy sat upon the piazza with Jessie in his lap, while Maddy was not very far away. At first there was much constraint between Agnes and Maddy, but with Guy to manage, it soon wore away, and Agnes felt herself exceedingly amiable when she reflected how gracious she had been to the young girl. But Maddy could not so soon forget. All through the day the conviction had been settling upon her that she could not stay at Aikenside, and on the following morning, just after breakfast was over, she summoned courage to ask Mr. Guy if she might talk with him. Leading the way to his library, he bade her sit down, while he took the chair opposite, and then waited for her to commence. Maddy was afraid of Guy. He did not seem like Dr. Holbrook. He was haughtier in his manner, while his rather elaborate style of dress, and polished manners, gave him, in her estimation, a kind of superiority over all the men she had ever met. Besides that, she remembered how his dark eyes had flashed when she told him what she did the previous day, and also that she had said to his face that she hated him. She could not bear to leave a bad impression on his mind, so the first words she said to him were: “Mr. Remington, I can’t stay here after all that has happened. It would not be pleasant for me or Mrs. Remington, so I am going home, but I want you to forget what I said about hating you yesterday. I did not then know who you were. I don’t hate you. I like you, and I wish you to like me.” She did not look at him, for her eyelids were cast down, and her lashes were wet with the tears she could scarcely keep from shedding. Guy had never known much about girls of Maddy’s age, and there was something extremely fascinating in the artless simplicity of this half-child, half-woman, sitting there before him, and asking him so demurely to like her. She was very pretty, he thought, and would make a beautiful woman. Then, as he remembered his avowed intention of urging the doctor to make her his wife some day, the idea flashed upon him that it would be very generous, very magnanimous in him to educate her expressly for the doctor, and though he hardly seemed to wait at all ere replying to Maddy, he had in the brief interval formed a skeleton plan, and seen it in all its bearings and triumphal result. “I am much obliged for your liking me,” he said, a little mischievously. “You surely have not much reason to do so when you recall the incidents of our first interview. Maddy—Miss Clyde, I mean—I have come to the conclusion that I knew less than you did, and I beg your pardon for annoying you so terribly.”