earance in company.
He had a curiosity about her now as lively as it was wholly new. He took
a great interest in observing how she walked and talked and laughed, how
she sat down and rose up and demeaned herself. It gave him an odd but
marked gratification to note how favorably she compared in style and
appearance with the girls present. Even while he was talking with Ella
Perry, with whom he believed himself in love, he was so busy making
these observations that Ella dismissed him with the sarcastic advice to
follow his eyes, which he presently proceeded to do.

Maud greeted him with a very fair degree of self-possession, though her
cheeks were delightfully rosy. At first it was evidently difficult
for her to talk, and her embarrassment betrayed uncertainty as to
the stability of the conventional footing which his call of the other
evening had established between them. Gradually, however, the easy,
nonchalant tone which he affected seemed to give her confidence, and
she talked more easily. Her color continued to be unusually though not
unbecomingly high, and it took a great deal of skirmishing for him
to get a glance from her eyes, but her embarrassment was no longer
distressing. Arthur, indeed, was scarcely in a mood to notice that she
did not bear her full part in the conversation. The fact of conversing
on any terms with a young lady who had confessed to him what Maud
had was so piquant in itself that it would have made talk in the
deaf-and-dumb alphabet vivacious. All the while, as they laughed and
talked together quite as any other two young people might do, those
words of hers the other night: "I care for you very much," "Be a little
good to me," were ringing in his ears. The reflection that by virtue of
her confession of love she was his whenever he should wish to claim her,
even though he never should claim her, was constantly in his mind, and
gave him a sense of potential proprietorship which was decidedly heady.

"Arthur Burton seems to be quite fascinated. I never supposed that he
fancied Maud Elliott before, did you?" said one of the young ladies, a
little maliciously, to Ella Perry. Ella tossed her head and replied that
really she had never troubled herself about Mr. Burton's fancies, which
was not true. The fact is, she was completely puzzled as well as vexed
by Arthur's attentions to Maud. There was not a girl in her set of whom
she would not sooner have thought as a rival. Arthur had never, to her
know