time
glided into spring, and spring had become summer. In the early part of
June a report that Arthur Burton and Maud Elliott were engaged obtained
circulation, and, owing to the fact that he had so long been apparently
devoted to her, was generally believed. Whenever Maud went out she met
congratulations on every side, and had to reply a dozen times a day that
there was no truth in the story, and smilingly declare that she could
not imagine how it started. After doing which, she would go home and cry
all night, for Arthur was not only not engaged to her, but she had come
to know in her heart that he never would be.

At first, and indeed for a long time, she was so proud of the frank and
loyal friendship between them, such as she was sure had never before
existed between unplighted man and maid, that she would have been
content to wait half her lifetime for him to learn to love her, if only
she were sure that he would at last. But, after all, it was the hope of
his love, not his friendship, that had been the motive of her desperate
venture. As month after month passed, and he showed no symptoms of any
feeling warmer than esteem, but always in the midst of his cordiality
was so careful lest he should do or say anything to arouse unfounded
expectations in her mind, she lost heart and felt that what she had
hoped was not to be. She said to herself that the very fact that he was
so much her friend should have warned her that he would never be her
lover, for it is not often that lovers are made out of friends.

It is always embarrassing for a young lady to have to deny a report of
her engagement, especially when it is a report she would willingly have
true; but what made it particularly distressing for Maud that this
report should have got about was her belief that it would be the means
of bringing to an end the relations between them. It would undoubtedly
remind Arthur, by showing how the public interpreted their friendship,
that his own prospects in other quarters, and he might even think
justice to her future, demanded the discontinuance of attentions which
must necessarily be misconstrued by the world. The public had been quite
right in assuming that it was time for them to be engaged. Such an
intimacy as theirs between a young man and a young woman, unless it were
to end in an engagement, had no precedent and belonged to no known
social category. It was vain, in the long run, to try to live
differently from other peopl