feminine instinct
impelled her to use her strongest weapons against any masculine adversary.
Yet, subtracting all these influences from her speech, it was still left
fraught with delicious meaning. I had no wish to wrong Jack, but my vanity
was tickled by the suggestion that I had something which was my own hidden
treasure. I found a line which suited the sentimental nature of my
thoughts. "The children of Alice call Bertram father." I used to repeat it
to myself with exquisite pain, and think of the time when I should see
Jack with his wife beside him, their children at their feet. "The children
of Alice call Bertram father." I was impressed with the deep romance of
common life, and wrote more bad verses at that period than I would have
confessed to my dearest friend.

Harry Dart, who was the closest observer of our coterie, was not long in
making the discovery that I was despondent about something, and presently
taxed me with being in love with Georgy Lenox. I found myself terribly
vexed with him, and also with myself, but not on my own account. I could
not reply to his raillery. It seemed to me horribly unfair for him to
steal my shadow of a secret and then proclaim it aloud; but I was not so
badly off but that I could stand what he said about myself. In fact, I was
glad to be held up to ridicule, and, thus disillusionized, see my fault in
its true colors. It seemed to me unworthy of Harry to attack a defenceless
girl in this way, engaged, too, as she was to his cousin. Had I not known
him all my life as well as I knew myself, I should have suspected that
something underlay his malice--that she had injured him in some way, and
that he was ungenerous enough thus to gratify an unreasonable spite.

Jack and I were out one evening, and returning entered our sitting-room
together, and found Harry there with two or three men not belonging to the
college, and among them Thorpe. It was evident to me that they changed
their subject as we entered, but the talk at once flowed again, and Harry
excelled as usual in quaint fancies, happy repartees and sharp flings at
all of us while he lay stretched out in my reclining-chair smoking before
the fire. Jack had evidently been to see Georgy, and looked dreamy and
content, and joined the circle instead of going at once to his books.
Thorpe made allusion once or twice to his pleasant abstraction, but Jack
was indifferent, and even after the visitors were gone he sat looking at
the fire