te. I am going away in
disgrace. I feel that so acutely."

"What nonsense! How are you in disgrace?"

"Mr. Fenwick and you think that I have behaved badly. I know you do,
and I feel it so strongly! I think so much of him, and believe him to
be so good, and so wise, and so understanding,--he knows what people
should do, and should be, so well,--that I cannot doubt that I have
been wrong if he thinks so."

"He only wishes that you could have made up your mind to marry a most
worthy man, who is his friend, and who, by marrying you, would have
fixed you close to us. He wishes it still, and so do I."

"But he thinks that I have been--have been mopish, and
lack-a-daisical, and--and--almost untrue. I can hear it in the tone
of his voice, and see it in his eye. I can tell it from the way he
shakes hands with me in the morning. He is such a true man that I
know in a moment what he means at all times. I am going away under
his displeasure, and I wish I had never come."

"Return as Mrs. Gilmore, and all his displeasure will disappear."

"Yes, because he would forgive me. He would say to himself that, as
I had repented, I might be taken back to his grace; but as things are
at present he condemns me. And so do you."

"If you ask me, Mary, I must tell the truth. I don't think you know
your own mind."

"Suppose I don't, is that disgraceful?"

"But there comes a time when a girl should know her own mind. You are
giving this poor fellow an enormous deal of unnecessary trouble."

"I have known my own mind so far as to tell him that I could not
marry him."

"As far as I understand, Mary, you have always told him to wait a
little longer."

"I have never asked him to wait, Janet;--never. It is he who says
that he will wait; and what can I answer when he says so? All the
same I don't mean to defend myself. I do believe that I have been
wrong, and I wish that I had never come here. It sounds ungrateful,
but I do. It is so dreadful to feel that I have incurred the
displeasure of people that I love so dearly."

"There is no displeasure, Mary; the word is a good deal too strong.
I wonder what you'll think of all this when the parson and his wife
come up on future Sundays to dine with the Squire and his lady. I
have long since made up my mind that when afternoon service is over,
we ought to go up and be made much of at the Privets; and you're
putting all this off till I'm an old woman--for a chimera. It's about
our Sunday dinner