. 'How
could he help it? He has seen nobody else to be smitten with.'

But Betty Frere was not sure of any such thing; and the very fact of
Pitt's disengagedness made him more ensnaring to her. There was nobody
else in the village to divert his attention, and the two young people
were thrown very much together. They went driving, they rode, and they
talked, continually. The map of London was often out, and Mrs. Dallas
saw the two heads bent over it, and interested faces looking into each
other; and she thought things were going on very fairly. If only the
vacation were not so short! For only a little time more, and Pitt must
be back at his chambers in London. The mother sighed to herself. She
was paying rather a heavy price to keep her son from Dissenters!

Betty Frere too remembered that the vacation was coming to an end, and
drew her breath rather short. She was depending on Pitt too much for
her amusement, she told herself, and to be sure there were other young
men in the world that could talk; but she felt a sort of disgust at the
thought of them all. They were not near so interesting. They all
flattered her, and some of them were supposed to be brilliant; but
Betty turned from the thought of them to the one whose lips never
condescended to say pretty things, nor made any effort to say witty
things. They behaved towards her with a sort of obsequious reverence,
which was the fashion of that day much more than of this; and Betty
liked far better a manner which never made pretence of anything, was
thoroughly natural and perfectly well-bred, but which frankly paid more
honour to his mother than to herself. She admired Pitt's behaviour to
his mother. Even to his mother it had less formality than was the
custom of the day; while it gave her every delicate little attention
and every possible graceful observance. The young beauty had sense
enough to see that this promised more for Pitt's future wife than any
amount of civil subserviency to herself. Perhaps there is not a quality
which women value more in a man, or miss more sorely, than what we
express by the term manliness. And she saw that Pitt, while he was
enthusiastic and eager, and what she called fanciful, always was true,
honest, and firm in what he thought right. From that no fancy carried
him away.

And Miss Betty found the days pass with almost as much charm as
fleetness. How fleet they were she did not bear to think. She found
herself recognising Pitt's step,