“O, you are so much wiser than I, and so much nobler!” she replied. “It is just because you are good, because you have the best heart that ever was, that you care for me. You found me lonely and unhappy, and so you pitied me and took charge of me.” “O no!” he began; but we will not repeat his protestations; we will just say that he, too, was properly humble. “Have you really been lonely and sad?” he went on, curious to know every item of her life, every beat of her heart. “Does that old house look like a paradise to you?” she asked, pointing to the dwelling of Squire Lauson. “It isn’t very old, and it doesn’t look very horrible,” he replied, a little anxious as he thought of his future housekeeping. “Perhaps ours will not be so fine a one.” “I was not thinking of that,” declared Bessie. “_Our_ house will be charming, even if it has but one story, and that under ground. But _this_ one! You don’t see it with my eyes; you haven’t lived in it.” “Is it haunted?” inquired Foster, of whom we must say that he did not believe in ghosts, and, in fact, scorned them with all the scorn of a philosopher. “Yes, and by people who are not yet buried,—people who call themselves alive.” The subject was a delicate one probably, for Bessie said no more concerning it, and Foster considerately refrained from further questions. There was one thing on which this youth especially prided himself, and that was on being a gentleman in every sense possible to a republican. Because his father had been a judge, and his grandfather and great-grandfather clergymen, he conceived that he belonged to a patrician class, similar to that which Englishmen style “the untitled nobility,” and that he was bound to exhibit as many chivalrous virtues as if his veins throbbed with the blood of the Black Prince. Although not combative, and not naturally reckless of pain and death, he would have faced Heenan and Morrissey together in fight, if convinced that his duty as a gentleman demanded it. Similarly he felt himself obliged “to do the handsome thing” in money matters; to accept, for instance, without haggling, such a salary as was usual in his profession; to be as generous to waiters as if he were a millionaire. Furthermore, he must be magnanimous to all that great multitude who were his inferiors, and particularly must he be fastidiously decorous and tender in his treatment of women. All these things he did or refrained from doing, not only out of good instincts towards others, but out of respect for himself.