“You think he wouldn’t take it?”

“I think it is very likely.”

“What a fool! —­ Then I shall send away my horse!” said Elizabeth; “for either he must be under obligation to me, or I to him; and I don’t choose the latter.”

“Do you expect to get through the world without being under obligation to anybody?” said Winthrop smiling.

But Elizabeth had turned, and marching out of the house did not make any reply.

“What’s the objection to being under obligation, Miss Elizabeth?” said Mrs. Landholm.  Elizabeth was mounting her horse, in which operation Winthrop assisted her.

“It don’t suit me!”

“Fortune’s suits do not always fit,” said Winthrop.  “But then —­”

“Then what?” —­

“She never alters them.”

Elizabeth’s eyes fired, and an answer was on her lip, but meeting the very composed face of the last speaker, as he put her foot in the stirrup, she thought better of it.  She looked at him and asked,

“What if one does not choose to wear them?”

“Nothing for it but to fight Fortune,” said Winthrop smiling; —­ “or go without any.”

“I would rather go anyhow!” said Elizabeth, —­ “than be obliged to anybody, —­ of course except to my father.”

“How if you had a husband?” inquired Mrs. Landholm with a good-humoured face.

It was a turn Elizabeth did not like; she did not answer Mrs. Landholm as she would have answered her cousin.  She hesitated.

“I never talk about that, Mrs. Landholm,” she said a little haughtily, with a very pretty tinge upon her cheek; —­ “I would not be obliged to anybody but my father; —­ never.”

“Why?” said Mrs. Landholm.  “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you see, Mrs. Landholm, —­ the person under obligation is always the inferior.”

“I never felt it so,” she replied.

Her guest could not feel, what her son did, the strong contrast they made.  One little head was held as if certainly the neck had never been bowed under any sort of pressure; the other, in its meek dignity, spoke the mind of too noble a level to be either raised or lowered by an accident.

“It is another meaning of the word, mother, from that you arc accustomed to,” Winthrop said.

Elizabeth looked at him, but nothing was to be gained from his face.

“Will you have the goodness to hand me my riding-whip,” she said shortly.

“You will have to be obliged to me for that,” he said as he picked it up.

“Yes,” said Elizabeth; “but I pay for this obligation with a ’thank you’!”

So she did, and with a bow at once a little haughty and not a little graceful.  It was the pure grace of nature, the very speaking of her mind at the moment.  Turning her horse’s head she trotted off, her blue habit fluttering and her little head carried very gracefully to the wind and her horse’s motion.  They stood and looked after her.