“I don’t think I shall marry Mr Jackson now, mother,” she said. Mrs Petheram looked at her daughter and at her daughter’s gown. “You’d better tell me more about it to-morrow. You look tired to-night, dear,” she replied. But Winifred never told her any more--in the first place, because the family was too delighted with the fact to care one straw about how it had come to pass, and, in the second place, on the more important ground that the thing was really too small, too trivial, and too absurd to bear telling--at least to the family. To me, for some reason or other, Winifred did tell it, or some of it--enough, anyhow, to enable me, with the help of a few touches of imagination, to conjecture how it occurred. “Don’t you think it was very absurd?” she asked at the end of her story. We were sitting by the yew hedge, near the library windows, looking across the flower beds to the meadow; it was a beautiful day, and the old place was charming. “Because,” she added, “I did love him, you know; and it seems a small thing to separate about, doesn’t it?” “If he had behaved differently----” I began. “I don’t see how he could be expected to,” she murmured. “You expected him to,” I said firmly. She turned to me with an appearance of interest, as though I might be able to interpret to her something that had been causing her puzzle. “Or you wouldn’t have looked at him as you say you did--or smiled at him, as you admit you did. But you were wrong to expect him to, because he’s not that kind of man.” “What kind of man?” “The kind of man to catch you in his arms, smother you in kisses (allow me the old phrase), tell you that he understood all you felt, knew all you were giving up, realised the great thing you were doing for him.” Winifred was listening. I went on with my imaginary scene of romantic fervour. “That when he contrasted that mean little place with the beauties you were accustomed to, with the beauties which were right and proper for you, when he saw your daintiness soiled by that dust, that gown whose hem he would willingly----” “He needn’t say quite as much as that,” interrupted Winifred, smiling a little. “Well, or words to that effect,” said I. “That when he did all this and saw all this, you know, he loved you more, and knew that you loved him more than he had dared to dream, with a deeper love, a love that gave up for him all that you loved next best and second only to him; that after seeing your tears he would never doubt again that you would face all trials and all troubles with him at your side--Don’t you think, if he’d said something of that kind, accompanying his words with the appropriate actions----” I paused. “Well?” asked Winifred. “Don’t you think you might have been living in that horrid little house now, instead of being about to contract an alliance with Sir Barton Amesbury?” “How do you know I shall do that?” she cried.