with any kindness at all, any memory not
disagreeable and--and detestable, you will not talk to me of their
advice. Even if I had been inclined to care for you, Mr. Sheppard, you
took a wrong way when you came in their name and talked of their
authority. Next time you ask a girl to marry you, Mr. Sheppard, do it in
your own name."

He caught eagerly at the kind of negative hope that seemed to be held
out to him.

"If that's an objection," he began, "I assure you that I came quite of
my own motion, and I am the last man in the world to endeavor to bring
any unfair means to bear. Of course it is not as if they were your own
parents, and I can quite understand how a young lady must feel----"

"I don't know much of how young ladies feel," Minola said quietly, "but
I know how I feel, Mr. Sheppard, and you know it too. Take my last word.
I'll never marry you. You only waste your time, and perhaps the time of
somebody else as well--some good girl, Mr. Sheppard, who would be glad
to marry you and whom you will be quite ready to make love to the day
after to-morrow."

Her heart was hardened against him now, for she thought him mean and
craven and unmanly. Perhaps, according to her familiar creed, she ought
rather to have thought him manly, meanness being in that sense one of
the attributes of man. She did not believe in the genuineness of his
love, and in any case no thought was more odious to her than that of a
man pressing a girl to marry him if she did not love him and was not
ready to meet him half way.

There was a curious contrast between these two figures as they stood on
the steps of that great empty tomb. The contrast was all the more
singular and even the more striking because the two might easily have
been described in such terms as would seem to suggest no contrast. If
they were described as a handsome young man (for he was scarcely more
than thirty) and a handsome young woman, the description would be
correct. He was rather tall, she was rather tall; but he was formal,
severe, respectable, and absolutely unpicturesque--she was picturesque
in every motion. His well-made clothes sat stiffly on him, and the first
idea he conveyed was that he was carefully dressed. Even a woman would
not have thought, at the first glance at least, of how _she_ was
dressed. She only impressed one with a sense of the presence of graceful
and especially emotional womanhood. The longer one looked at the two the
deeper the contrast see