The Real Lover being, by virtue of his Loverhood, strictly dishonourable, encouraged her to be just to the other. “Yes,” he said gravely, “I should be sorry to think that he is otherwise than a good kind of chap--for a professor of politics. But there are heiresses and heiresses. Money is a very minor inheritance. I am quite ready to believe as you did, that he had a real--that is to say, a--an honest--he may have fancied it was honest--feeling that you--yes, that you could advance his interests. Oh, I don’t say that these clever chaps are indifferent to beauty and grace and the soul of a woman as the means of advancing their own ends. I dare say that he had a notion that you--but he’ll certainly have a look in where there are heiresses now.” “You are grossly unjust--you are grossly ungenerous--and I am deeply hurt,” said she. “That makes me love you all the more,” he cried. “For every word you say in his favour I will love you an extra thousand years.” He knew that if he could only stimulate her to talk still more generously about Mr. Clifton he would soon get her to feel that she had not been guilty of the breach of honour with which she was still inclined to reproach herself. It was so like a woman, he thought, to place so much importance upon a little flaw in the etiquette of being off with the old love and on with the new. He loved her the more for her femininity and he thought that he might lead her on to feel that she had actually been generous in respect of the other. “I will not have a word said against Mr. Clifton,” she said firmly. And she did not hear a word said against him, though she had so earnestly encouraged him to say such a word; but the fact was that the dinner-hour of the prosaic harvesters had come to an end, and the reaping machine, with the patent binding attachment, began to work under their eyes, and a girl cannot speak well even of the man whom she has just thrown over when so interesting a machine is at hand. The two stood spell-bound watching that beautiful thing of blue picked out with red, as it went mightily on its way down the wall of standing grain, stretching out its pendulous arms with a rhythmic regularity that a poet might have envied,--lifting the material for a sheaf and laying it along with more than the tenderness of a mother for her child, laying it in its cot. How much more picturesque--how much more stimulating to the imagination was not this marvellous creature--this graminivorous reanimated thing of the early world, than the squalid shrill-voiced, beer-ex-haling reapers of the fields in the days gone by? This was the boldly expressed opinion of both the watchers, though each of them had a good word to say for the cycle of the sickle.