Peter drew a hand through his handsome hair; looked down reflectively and looked up smiling. "Will you come in?" he suggested. A decided shake of the head answered that. "My five years' seniority wouldn't excuse it--to the Greenes and Aylors! I doubt if even my mother could venture it. We may risk ten minutes here at the gate." Mistress Amanda began flicking her whip at a thistle; her forehead gathering lines. Suddenly the words shot from her: "You are a patient man!" "Well! You haven't come two miles to tell me that?" "But I have. Patience is a most unusual virtue--in a man, but there is such a thing as having too much of it. Do you remember the story of the fox and the wolf?" "The nursery tale? Let me see. I think my grandmother used to tell it to me, but that was long ago. I forget the point." "The wolf bit him--put out his eyes, and so on, the fox simply saying all the time, 'patience!' Till finally the enemy tore his heart out, and the fox found, too late, that patience is the most dangerous of all virtues." Peter gazed at the narrator of this fable in amazement. For the first time in his life the idea that women are incomprehensible found lodgment in his mind. "Ah, I see you think me daft," said his friend. And not for the first time in her life, by any means, she found a man dense. "In so many plain words, then, are you not in love?" The blood seemed on the point of bursting through Peter's skin; his head weighed a ton; his legs became pipe-stems. He gasped something inarticulately. Then, manly sense asserted itself. His look grew steady and grave and nobody could have found fault with his manner, as he said: "You know I love your daughter. I reckon everybody knows that." Mistress Amanda turned impulsively. Her face had been carefully averted during this conversation, but now she let her eyes meet his. There was the emphasis of a kept-down excitement in her tone: "Everybody except the one person who ought to know it. It is a well-kept secret so far as she's concerned." "I've only been waiting for the right time--she's so young--such a child!" Things danced in the sunshine before the man's eyes. His long, lovely dream!--this was so sudden a call to hard reality; he could not waken in a minute. "Nellie is not a girl to be won by accumulated acts of worship," said Mistress Amanda tersely. "Some girls can be won in that way; romantic girls. They would be flattered at being made the subject of verses; would like to feel that a great, powerful creature trembled before them. But Nellie is wonderfully free from that sort of vanity. So far from understanding the real feeling that is at the bottom of all the favors you show her she looks upon you as a sort of good godfather who has a fanciful, half-playful preference for her. You have never come near enough to her to touch the ruling motive of her character."