l feel that you don't quite understand us
yet." Matthias Pardon remained; her father and mother, expressing their
perfect confidence that he would excuse them, went to bed and left him
sitting there. He stayed a good while longer, nearly an hour, and said
things that made Verena think that _he_, perhaps, would like to marry
her. But while she listened to him, more abstractedly than her custom
was, she remarked to herself that there could be no difficulty in
promising Olive so far as he was concerned. He was very pleasant, and he
knew an immense deal about everything, or, rather, about every one, and
he would take her right into the midst of life. But she didn't wish to
marry him, all the same, and after he had gone she reflected that, once
she came to think of it, she didn't want to marry any one. So it would
be easy, after all, to make Olive that promise, and it would give her so
much pleasure!

XVII

The next time Verena saw Olive she said to her that she was ready to
make the promise she had asked the other night; but, to her great
surprise, this young woman answered her by a question intended to check
such rashness. Miss Chancellor raised a warning finger; she had an air
of dissuasion almost as solemn as her former pressure; her passionate
impatience appeared to have given way to other considerations, to be
replaced by the resignation that comes with deeper reflexion. It was
tinged in this case, indeed, by such bitterness as might be permitted to
a young lady who cultivated the brightness of a great faith.

"Don't you want any promise at present?" Verena asked. "Why, Olive, how
you change!"

"My dear child, you are so young--so strangely young. I am a thousand
years old; I have lived through generations--through centuries. I know
what I know by experience; you know it by imagination. That is
consistent with your being the fresh, bright creature that you are. I am
constantly forgetting the difference between us--that you are a mere
child as yet, though a child destined for great things. I forgot it the
other night, but I have remembered it since. You must pass through a
certain phase, and it would be very wrong in me to pretend to suppress
it. That is all clear to me now; I see it was my jealousy that spoke--my
restless, hungry jealousy. I have far too much of that; I oughtn't to
give any one the right to say that it's a woman's quality. I don't want
your signature; I only want your confidence--only what