“I should think you would not,” said Elizabeth, wondering.

“There I heard of you. —­ Shall we walk down again?”

“If you please.  I don’t care whether up or down.”

“I could not go home without turning a little out of my way to pay this visit to you.  I hope I shall be forgiven.”

“I don’t know what I have to forgive, yet,” said Elizabeth.

He was silent, and bit his lip nervously.

“Will you permit me to say —­ that I look back with great pleasure to former times passed in your society —­ in Mannahatta; —­ that in those days I once ventured to entertain a thought which I abandoned as hopeless, —­ I had no right to hope, —­ but that since I have heard of the misfortunes which have befallen you, it has come back to me again with a power I have not had the strength to resist —­ along with my sympathy for those misfortunes.  Dear Miss Haye, I hope for your forgiveness and noble interpretation, when I say that I have dared to confess this to you from the impulse of the very circumstances which make it seem most daring.”

“The misfortunes you allude to, are but one,” said Elizabeth.

“One —­ yes, —­ but not one in the consequences it involved.”

“At that rate of reckoning,” said Elizabeth, “there would be to such a thing as one misfortune in the world.”

“I was not thinking of one,” said Rufus quietly.  “The actual loss you have suffered is one shared by many —­ pardon me, it does not always imply equal deprivation, nor the same need of a strong and helping friendly hand.”

Elizabeth answered with as much quietness, —­

“It is probably good for me that I have care on my hands —­ it would be a weak wish, however natural, to wish that I could throw off on some agent the charge of my affairs.”

“The charge I should better like,” said Rufus looking at her, —­ “the only charge I should care for, —­ would be the charge of their mistress.”

An involuntary quick movement of Elizabeth put several feet between them; then after half a minute, with a flushed face and somewhat excited breathing, she said, not knowing precisely what she said,

“I would rather give you the charge of my property, sir.  The other is, you don’t very well know what.”

“My brother would be the better person to perform the first duty, probably,” Rufus returned, with a little of his old-fashioned haughtiness of style.

Elizabeth’s lips parted and her eye flashed, but as she was not looking at him, it only flashed into the water.  Both stood proudly silent and still.  Elizabeth was the first to speak, and her tone was gentle, whatever the words might be.

“You cannot have your wish in this matter, Mr. Landholm, and it would be no blessing to you if you could.  I trust it will be no great grief to you that you cannot.”

“My grief is my own,” said Rufus with a mixture of expressions.  “How should that be no blessing to me, which it is the greatest desire of my life to obtain, Miss Haye?”