She was now smiling like an angel and, God help me!  I was heels over head in love with her!  Did she, by some of the many methods of divination known to her sex, read my feelings?  Her whole manner had altered.

“Come,” she said, almost coaxingly, “promise that you will not be impolite again.”  She took my arm in the most friendly way.  “Come, I will walk with you.  He will not know—­he will remain away all night.”

Up and down the veranda we paced in the moonlight, she seemingly forgetting her recent bereavement, cooing and murmuring girl-wise of every kind of nothing in all Brownville; I silent, consciously awkward and with something of the feeling of being concerned in an intrigue.  It was a revelation—­this most charming and apparently blameless creature coolly and confessedly deceiving the man for whom a moment before she had acknowledged and shown the supreme love which finds even death an acceptable endearment.

“Truly,” I thought in my inexperience, “here is something new under the moon.”

And the moon must have smiled.

Before we parted I had exacted a promise that she would walk with me the next afternoon—­before going away forever—­to the Old Mill, one of Brownville’s revered antiquities, erected in 1860.

“If he is not about,” she added gravely, as I let go the hand she had given me at parting, and of which, may the good saints forgive me, I strove vainly to repossess myself when she had said it—­so charming, as the wise Frenchman has pointed out, do we find woman’s infidelity when we are its objects, not its victims.  In apportioning his benefactions that night the Angel of Sleep overlooked me.

The Brownville House dined early, and after dinner the next day Miss Maynard, who had not been at table, came to me on the veranda, attired in the demurest of walking costumes, saying not a word.  “He” was evidently “not about.”  We went slowly up the road that led to the Old Mill.  She was apparently not strong and at times took my arm, relinquishing it and taking it again rather capriciously, I thought.  Her mood, or rather her succession of moods, was as mutable as skylight in a rippling sea.  She jested as if she had never heard of such a thing as death, and laughed on the lightest incitement, and directly afterward would sing a few bars of some grave melody with such tenderness of expression that I had to turn away my eyes lest she should see the evidence of her success in art, if art it was, not artlessness, as then I was compelled to think it.  And she said the oddest things in the most unconventional way, skirting sometimes unfathomable abysms of thought, where I had hardly the courage to set foot.  In short, she was fascinating in a thousand and fifty different ways, and at every step I executed a new and profounder emotional folly, a hardier spiritual indiscretion, incurring fresh liability to arrest by the constabulary of conscience for infractions of my own peace.