ly
resented.

It only needed a few days to make it plain to this good fellow that
the coming of one of the summer guests had made a great difference in
his life. It was easy to find a hundred excuses for going to Miss
Prince's, who smiled benignantly upon his evident interest in the fair
stranger within her gates. The truth must be confessed, however, that
the episode of the lamed shoulder at the picnic party had given Mr.
George Gerry great unhappiness. There was something so high and
serene in Anna Prince's simplicity and directness, and in the way in
which she had proved herself adequate to so unusual an occasion, that
he could not help mingling a good deal of admiration with his
dissatisfaction. It is in human nature to respect power; but all his
manliness was at stake, and his natural rights would be degraded and
lost, if he could not show his power to be greater than her own. And
as the days went by, every one made him more certain that he longed,
more than he had ever longed for anything before, to win her love. His
heart had never before been deeply touched, but life seemed now like a
heap of dry wood, which had only waited for a live coal to make it
flame and leap in mysterious light, and transfigure itself from
dullness into a bewildering and unaccountable glory. It was no wonder
any longer that poets had sung best of love and its joys and sorrows,
and that men and women, since the world began, had followed at its
call. All life and its history was explained anew, yet this eager
lover felt himself to be the first discoverer of the world's great
secret.

It was hard to wait and to lack assurance, but while the hours when he
had the ideal and the dream seemed to make him certain, he had only to
go back to Miss Prince's to become doubtful and miserable again. The
world did not consent to second his haste, and the persons most
concerned in his affairs were stupidly slow at understanding the true
state of them. While every day made the prize look more desirable,
every day seemed to put another barrier between himself and Nan; and
when she spoke of her visit's end it was amazing to him that she
should not understand his misery. He wondered at himself more and more
because he seemed to have the power of behaving much as usual when he
was with his friends; it seemed impossible that he could always go on
without betraying his thoughts. There was no question of any final
opposition to his suit, it seemed to him; he