Miss Triscoe took down her handkerchief from a face that had certainly not been beautified by grief.  “I didn’t blame him for the flirting; or not so much.  It was his keeping it from me afterwards.  He ought to have told me the very first instant we were engaged.  But he didn’t.  He let it go on, and if I hadn’t happened on that bouquet I might never have known anything about it.  That is what I mean by—­a false nature.  I wouldn’t have minded his deceiving me; but to let me deceive myself—­Oh, it was too much!”

Agatha hid her face in her handkerchief again.  She was perching on the edge of the berth, and Mrs. March said, with a glance, which she did not see, toward the sofa, “I’m afraid that’s rather a hard seat for you.

“Oh, no, thank you!  I’m perfectly comfortable—­I like it—­if you don’t mind?”

Mrs. March pressed her hand for answer, and after another little delay, sighed and said, “They are not like us, and we cannot help it.  They are more temporizing.”

“How do you mean?” Agatha unmasked again.

“They can bear to keep things better than we can, and they trust to time to bring them right, or to come right of themselves.”

“I don’t think Mr. March would trust things to come right of themselves!” said Agatha in indignant accusal of Mrs. March’s sincerity.

“Ah, that’s just what he would do, my dear, and has done, all along; and I don’t believe we could have lived through without it:  we should have quarrelled ourselves into the grave!”

“Mrs. March!”

“Yes, indeed.  I don’t mean that he would ever deceive me.  But he would let things go on, and hope that somehow they would come right without any fuss.”

“Do you mean that he would let anybody deceive themselves?”

“I’m afraid he would—­if he thought it would come right.  It used to be a terrible trial to me; and it is yet, at times when I don’t remember that he means nothing but good and kindness by it.  Only the other day in Ansbach—­how long ago it seems!—­he let a poor old woman give him her son’s address in Jersey City, and allowed her to believe he would look him up when we got back and tell him we had seen her.  I don’t believe, unless I keep right round after him, as we say in New England, that he’ll ever go near the man.”

Agatha looked daunted, but she said, “That is a very different thing.”

“It isn’t a different kind of thing.  And it shows what men are,—­the sweetest and best of them, that is.  They are terribly apt to be—­easy-going.”

“Then you think I was all wrong?” the girl asked in a tremor.