He felt himself flush, and also, with his eyes on them again successively as to show them how he smiled, felt the probability of his looking silly. "I make too much of it, I know; but what I miss is my having been right; I mean, don't you see," and still foolishly he heard himself explain, "about--well, about what we were saying." "Do you understand our clever cousin, mother dear, after all?" Molly wailed in a filial appeal. Mrs. Midmore's own attention helped to point the doubt. "He mustn't be _too_ terribly clever for us, certainly! We enjoy immensely your being so extraordinary; but I'm sure you'll take it in good part if I remind you that there is a limit." "Yes, of course there must be!" he quite seriously agreed. "A limit, I mean"--she bridled a little--"to our poor old English wit." "Oh that's another matter--and when you look at me in a certain way--even when Perry does," he declared, though he could have bitten his lip the next moment for his "even"--"I'm more afraid of it than I ever was of anything in my life. I took your reminder to be for the limit of our pleasure together; though why," he demanded of Molly, "should we fall to speech of that when the article itself has scarcely so much as begun? I do enjoy you--I do, I do!"--and he showed, almost with vehemence, that he meant it for them all. "It's for that very reason I should have liked to be wholly right. But there I am again!" he laughed--"I can't keep off that strangeness of my momentary lapse, for though it was short it was sharp. However----!" And he beamed in resolute relief upon brave Molly. "You can't keep off my everlasting little sister--that's what you can't keep off!" her bravery answered, though rather as to put it as helpfully as possible to his comprehension than to make a circumstance of her pretending to a jealousy that might or that mightn't become her. She struck him at that instant as not a little puzzled, and he had already felt how moving, in a person of her force, an unexpected patience would easily be. He had even for this one of those rarest reaches of apprehension on which he had been living and soaring for the past hour and which represented the joy he had just reasseverated; impatience was surely one of her bright marks, but he saw that to live with her would be to find her often deny it in ways unforeseen and that thus seemed for the moment to show themselves as the most delightful things in nature. "Well, but it isn't she, it's my own stupidity where I ought particularly not to have been stupid." He replied with the good-humour which he desired to feel so much more than anything else, and would have explained further but that she cut him straight off--he did of a truth, in spite of everything, keep giving her such opportunities.