As the accomplished _attaché_ uttered this with a soft arch smile, as though it were an infantine jest, he little thought what a large amount of self-control he called into action in his cousin's mind. To have seized him by the collar, and shaken him till he retracted the insulting words, would have been a great relief; to have rebuked him sternly for speaking lightly of a girl of whom he knew no evil, would have been some satisfaction; but modern manners forbade the first, and a due sense of the ridiculous the second. Control himself as Wilton might, he could not call up the answering smile which St. George expected, but instead stared at him with a fixed haughty stare, which, although rather unaccountable to its object, seemed sufficiently disagreeable to make him turn away and seek more congenial companionship. Wilton, too, talked and laughed, and played his part with a proper degree of animation; but a bruised, galled sensation clung to him all the evening. There is a large class of men for whom such a remark as St. George Wilton's would have been fatally destructive to the charm and romance enfolding an object of admiration. To find what is precious to them, common and unholy in the eyes of another, would destroy the preciousness and desecrate the holiness! But there is another, a smaller, though nobler and stronger class, whom the voice of the scoffer, scoff he never so subtly, cannot incite to doubt or disloyalty--to whom love is still lovely, and beauty still beautiful; although others apply different terms to what they have recognized as either one or the other. These are the men who see with their own eyes, and Wilton was one of them. It was with the sort of indignation a crusader might have felt to see an infidel handling a holy relic, that he thought of his cousin's careless words. Nay, more, reflecting that St. George was but one of many who would have thus felt and spoken of a girl to whom he dared not address a word of love lest it might check or destroy the sweet, frank friendliness with which she treated him, he asked himself again, what was to be the end thereof? Then he for the first time acknowledged to himself what he had often indistinctly felt before, that to tell her he loved her, to ask her to be his wife, to read astonishment, perhaps dawning tenderness, in her wonderful eyes, to hold her to his heart, to own her before the world, to shelter her from difficulty so far as one mortal can another, would be heaven to him! She had struck some deeper, truer chord in his nature than had ever been touched before; and his whole being answered; all that seemed impossible and insurmountable gradually faded into insignificance compared to his mighty need for that quiet, pale, dark-eyed little girl!