"After all," she said to herself, with hearty appreciation, "men do have the advantage of girls. He bothered me dreadfully, and I did not bother him in the least. And yet I stood as near to him as he did to me." Mrs. Belding came in a moment later. She was in high spirits. They had had a good meeting--had converted a Jew, she thought. She admired the sketch very much; hoped Alice had been no trouble to Farnham. He walked home with the ladies, and afterward smoked a cigar with great deliberation under the limes. Mrs. Belding asked Alice how they had got on. "He did not eat you, you see. You must get out of your ideas of men, especially men of Arthur Farnham's age. He never thinks of you. He is old enough to be your father." Alice kissed her mother and went to her own room, calculating on the way the difference between her age and Captain Farnham's. IX. A DRAMA WITH TWO SPECTATORS. The words of Bott lingered obstinately in Maud Matchin's mind. She gave herself no rest from dwelling on them. Her imagination was full, day after day, of glowing pictures of herself and Farnham in tete-a-tete; she would seek in a thousand ways to tell her love--but she could never quite arrange her avowal in a satisfactory manner. Long before she came to the decisive words which were to kindle his heart to flame in the imaginary dialogue, he would himself take fire by spontaneous combustion, and, falling on his knees, would offer his hand, his heart, and his fortune to her in words taken from "The Earl's Daughter" or the "Heir of Ashby." "Oh, pshaw! that's the way it ought to be," she would say to herself. "But if he won't--I wonder whether I ever could have the brass to do it? I don't know why I shouldn't. We are both human. Bott wouldn't have said that if there was nothing in it, and he's a mighty smart man." The night usually gave her courage. Gazing into her glass, she saw enough to inspire her with an idea of her own invincibility; and after she had grown warm in bed she would doze away, resolving with a stout heart that she would try her fate in the morning. But when day came, the enterprise no longer seemed so simple. Her scanty wardrobe struck her with cowardice as she surveyed it. The broad daylight made everything in the house seem poor and shabby. When she went down-stairs, her heart sank within her as she entered the kitchen to help her mother, and when she sat with the family at the breakfast-table, she had no faith left in her dreams of the rosy midnight. This alternation of feeling bred in her, in the course of a few days, a sort of fever, which lent a singular beauty to her face, and a petulant tang to her speech. She rose one morning, after a sleepless night, in a state of anger and excitement in which she had little difficulty in charging upon Farnham all responsibility for her trouble of mind.