"You confess so charmingly," Ralph returned, "that it only makes me love you the more"--for indeed it really touched him that she didn't protest with blushes or other missish arts, but showed herself, as he might have said, splendidly shameless. This after a fashion drew them closer still--for what was it but the success of his pleasantry? and it struck him that she had at no moment yet "told" for so frankly handsome as in seeming thus to invite him but to come on with what humour he would. This allowed him once more all the taste of finding himself right--so right that, for the matter of her "friteful", he knew as well, which meant he remembered, that she had added an 'l' at the end, which she always did in like case. Of this droll grace he now reminded her, to the further consecration of the brave intimacy playing between them; the freedom of which reached a climax, however, in his being able to convict her at once of the peculiar lapse that she admitted without naming it. There were moments, light as air, at which he proceeded by spasms of exhilaration--renewals, that is, of his sense of the sudden, the happy, the far jump to the point of vantage that just offered room, and no more, for the tips of his toes, thereby making it a miracle that, besides exactly alighting, he should afterwards balance himself too in such pride, the pride well-nigh of the poet's herald Mercury on his heaven-kissing hill. There it was before him, Molly's own finest flight, toward the lower right-hand corner of one of her loosest pages. "Your guilty secret is that of the 'goast' at some haunted house where you had paid a visit--unless it was but a case of a plural gone wrong and a house really haunted with goats!" She met him with the freshest interest over this, and it was extraordinary how nothing could more have expressed to him what a dear girl, in fact what a very fine young woman, she was; half the charm consisting moreover in the oddity that while she used, pen in hand, wrong letters galore, her lips, the loveliest in all the world, gave them to the ear in the fairest and rightest fusion, and testified to an education that would have had nothing to gain, one seemed to see, from better terms with her inkpot. It was much as if he had known in New York young women of a common literacy enough who at the same time carried no further the effect of breeding. His English cousin meanwhile denied, at any rate, the last aberration imputed to her--it wasn't a bit, she declared, her actual mistake, which latter, though really a worse one, he thereby showed he hadn't remarked.