“That’s enough for me,” cried Catherine, warmly.  “I have sufficient faith in you to leave all the rest to your own discretion and good sense and better heart.  And I never shall forget it, Duncan, never, never!  You are the one person he wouldn’t instantly suspect as an emissary, besides being the only one I ever—­ever trusted well enough to—­to take at your word as I have done.”

I thought myself that the sentence might have pursued a bolder course without untruth or necessary complications.  Perhaps my conceit was on a scale with my acknowledged infirmity where Catherine was concerned.  But I did think that there was more than trust in the eyes that now melted into mine; there was liking at least, and gratitude enough to inspire one to win infinitely more.  I went so far as to take in mine the hand to which I had dared to aspire in the temerity of my youth; nor shall I pretend for a moment that the old aspirations had not already mounted to their old seat in my brain.  On the contrary, I was only wondering whether the honesty of voicing my hopes would nowise counterbalance the caddishness of the sort of stipulation they might imply.

“All I ask,” I was saying to myself, “is that you will give me another chance, and take me seriously this time, if I prove myself worthy in the way you want.”

But I am glad to think I had not said it when tea came up, and saved a dangerous situation by breaking an insidious spell.

I stayed another hour at least, and there are few in my memory which passed more deliciously at the time.  In writing of it now I feel that I have made too little of Catherine Evers, in my anxiety not to make too much, yet am about to leave her to stand or to fall in the reader’s opinion by such impression as I have already succeeded in creating in his or her mind.  Let me add one word, or two, while yet I may.  A baron’s daughter (though you might have known Catherine some time without knowing that), she had nevertheless married for mere love as a very young girl, and had been left a widow before the birth of her boy.  I never knew her husband, though we were distant kin, nor yet herself during the long years through which she mourned him.  Catherine Evers was beginning to recover her interest in the world when first we met; but she never returned to that identical fold of society in which she had been born and bred.  It was, of course, despite her own performances, a fold to which the worldly wolf was no stranger; and her trouble had turned a light-hearted little lady into an eager, intellectual, speculative being, with a sort of shame for her former estate, and an undoubted reactionary dislike of dominion and of petty pomp.  Of her own high folk one neither saw nor heard a thing; her friends were the powerful preachers of most denominations, and one or two only painted or wrote; for she had been greatly exercised about religion, and somewhat solaced by the arts.