can't make you out at all.
You're not in love with Harry Tristram, are you?"

"With that boy?" asked Mina, attempting to be superb.

"That's women's old nonsense," observed Duplay, twirling his mustache
knowingly. "They often fall in love with young men and always try to
pass it off by calling them boys."

"Of course I haven't your experience, uncle," she rejoined, passing into
the sarcastic vein.

"And if you are," he went on, reverting to the special case, "I don't
see why you make his path smooth to Janie Iver."

"Some people are capable of self-sacrifice in their love."

"Yes, but I shouldn't think you'd be one of them," said the Major rather
rudely. He looked at her curiously. Her interest in Harry was
unmistakable, her championship of him had become thorough-going, fierce,
and (to the Major's mind) utterly unscrupulous. Was he faced with a
situation so startlingly changed? Did his niece object to turning Harry
off his throne because she harbored a hope of sharing it with him? If
that were so, and if the hope had any chance of becoming a reality,
Duplay would have to reconsider his game. But what chance of success
could there be? She would (he put it bluntly in his thoughts) only be
making a fool of herself.

The Imp screwed up her little lean face into a grimace which served
effectually to cover any sign of her real feelings. She neither admitted
nor denied the charge levied against her. She was bewildering her uncle,
and she found, as usual, a genuine pleasure in the pursuit. If she were
also bewildering herself a little with her constant thoughts of Harry
Tristram and her ardent championship of his cause, well, in the country
there is such a thing as being too peaceful, and up to the present time
the confusion of feeling had been rather pleasant than painful.

"I don't really know what I feel," she remarked the next moment. "But
you can read women, uncle, you've often said so, and I dare say you
really know more about what I feel than I do myself." A grossness of
innocence was her new assumption. "Now judging from what I do and
look--that's the way to judge, isn't it, not from what I say?--what do
you think my real inmost feelings are about Mr Tristram?"

If the Major had been asked what his real inmost feelings about his
niece were at the moment, he would have been at some difficulty to
express them decorously. She was back at fifteen--a particularly
exasperating child of fifteen. Her great eyes, with