‘Well, Noll,’ said Mrs. Ford, ‘it is better not to go into details. Very likely we should not understand them if you did, though I am no girl, nor is she a baby either, for the matter of that; but whatever you have been or done, the fact is that you are just Oliver Wentworth, when all is said: and as Oliver Wentworth is the man Grace has been fond of almost since she was a child, and who has been my brother since ever he was born--’ ‘Strange!’ he cried, with a curious outburst, half laugh, half groan, ‘to think she should have kept thinking of me all this time, while I--’ ‘Have been in love with her, and considered her all the time the first woman in the world. You told me so just now.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s not a lie, though you may think it so. I did feel that when I thought of--’ and here he paused and gave his sister a guilty look. ‘When you thought of her at all; you needn’t be ashamed, Noll. That’s the man’s way of putting it. We women all know that; but now that she is before your eyes and you cannot help thinking of her--now it has come all right.’ Trix too gave a laugh which was half crying; and then she dried her eyes and came solemnly up to him with a very serious face, and caught him by the arm and looked into his eyes. ‘Oliver, now that all that’s over, and you’re an older man and understand that life can’t go on so; and now that you are going to marry Grace, the woman you have always loved--Oliver, for the love of God, no more of it now.’ He gazed at her for a moment with a flash of something like fury in his eyes, and then flung her arm far from him with fierce indignation. ‘Do you think I am a brute beast without understanding?’ he cried. CHAPTER II