“What a brute I must seem to her! What must she have thought of me all these years? Why, no later than yesterday”--he paused in his walk, overwhelmed with the recollection--“I rejected her overtures for peace. I was savagely rude to her. My poor little Alice, you had indeed said quite enough, more than enough,” he muttered, resuming his walk. “What must she think of me? How can she have borne with me all this time? I refused, yes, point-blank, to kiss her, idiot that I was. I might have guessed at something of this kind, only that my devilish pride had strangled my common sense; and all this frightful misunderstanding was owing to this wretched bit of paper, this letter, that I would have given five years of my life for, and she, poor girl, has been breaking her heart about, and all the time it has been lying inside the skirt of that woman’s dress. After all,” he continued, taking it up, “it is a very dear and precious letter; I would not part with it, late as it comes, for a field-marshal’s bâton.” He read it twice over again, lingering on almost every word, then folded it up very carefully and put it in his waistcoat-pocket as he walked to the window. “No wonder,” said he, “she gave me a cool reception; I wonder what sort of one she would give me _now_ if I could catch her alone? She ought to hate me pretty well by this time, it is not _my_ fault if she does not. But she likes me a little bit still. She must, or she never could have stood the way I have treated her. If she only cares for me just one quarter as much as I care for her we shall do very well,” he thought to himself joyfully, as he stepped out of the window and joined the party who were sitting in the pleasure-ground, basking in the moonlight, and inhaling the soft bracing air, heavy with the perfume of syringa, roses, and new-mown hay. Mr. and Mrs. Mayhew, Miss Saville, and Mary were reposing in various garden-chairs. “Where is Alice?” asked her husband abruptly. “Oh, she and Geoffrey have gone to gather pears for the public weal.” “What, at this hour!” he exclaimed, standing at the top of the steps, gazing after two figures who were rapidly disappearing in the direction of the garden. “Small chance of a _tête-à-tête_ with Alice to-night,” he said to himself as he pulled his moustache thoughtfully.