“But you are unjust, Dan,--most unjust,” cried my father, warmly. “There was a kind of flirtation between us--I don't deny it,--but nothing more than is always going forward in this free-and-easy land of ours, where people play with their feelings as they do with their fortunes, and are quite astonished to discover, some fine morning, that they have fairly run through both one and the other. I liked her, and she perhaps liked me, somewhat better than any one else that she met as often. We got to become very intimate; to feel that in the disposal of our leisure hours--which meant the livelong day--we were excessively necessary to each other; in fact, that if our minds were not quite alike, our tastes were. Of course, before one gets that far, one's friends, as they call themselves, have gone far beyond it. There's no need of wearying you with detail. Somebody, I 'm sure I forget who it was, now took occasion to tell me that I was behaving ill to Kitty; that unless I really intended seriously,--that's the paraphrase for marriage,--my attentions were calculated to do her injury. Ay, by Jove! your match-making moralists talk of a woman as they would of a horse, and treat a broken flirtation as if it were a breach of warranty. I was, I own it, not a little annoyed at the unnecessary degree of interest my friends insisted on taking in my welfare; but I was not fool enough to go to war with the world single-handed, so I seemed to accept the counsel, and went my way. That same day, I rode out with Kitty. There was a large party of us, but by some chance we found ourselves side by side and in an avenue of the wood. Quite full as my mind was of the communication of the morning, I could not resist my usual impulse, which was to talk to her of any or every thing that was uppermost in my thoughts. I don't mean to say, Dan, that I did so delicately, or even becomingly, for I confess to you I had grown into that kind of intimacy whose gravest fault is that it has no reserve. I 'm quite certain that nothing could be worse in point of taste or feeling than what I said. You can judge of it from her reply: 'And are you such a fool, Walter, as to cut an old friend for such silly gossip?' I blundered out something in defence of myself,--floundered away into all kinds of stupid, unmeaning apologies, and ended by asking her to marry me. Up to that moment we were conversing in all the freedom of our old friendship, not the slightest reserve on either side; but no sooner had I uttered these words than she turned towards me with a look so sad and so reproachful, I did not believe that her features could have conveyed the expression, while, in a voice of deepest emotion, she said: 'Oh, Walter, this from you!' I was brute enough--there 's only one word for it--to misunderstand her; and, full of myself and the splendid offer I had made her, and my confounded _amour propre_, I muttered something about the opinion of the world, the voice of friends, and so on.