"
"Thank you. Mr. Dodd cannot penetrate there, I conclude."
"Of course not."
"Then she will be Mrs. Talboys."
"Of course she will."
Lucy sighed a little over David's ardent, despairing passion, and his
pale and drawn face. Her woman's instinct enabled her to comprehend in
part a passion she was at this period of her life incapable of
feeling, and she pitied him. He was the first of her admirers she had
ever pitied. She sighed a little, then fretted a little, then
reproached herself vaguely. "I must have been guilty of some
imprudence--given some encouragement. Have I failed in womanly
reserve, or is it all his fault? He is a sailor. Sailors are like
nobody else. He is so simple-minded. He sees, no doubt, that he is my
superior in all sterling qualities, and that makes him forget the
social distance between him and me. And yet why suspect him of
audacity? Poor fellow, he had not the courage to _say_ anything
to me, after all. No; he will go to sea, and forget his folly before
he comes back." Then she had a gust of egotism. It was nice to be
loved ardently and by a hero, even though that hero was not a
gentleman of distinction, scarcely a gentleman at all. The next moment
she blushed at her own vanity. Next she was seized with a sense of the
great indelicacy and unpardonable impropriety of letting her mind run
at all upon a person of the other sex; and shaking her lovely
shoulders, as much as to say, "Away idle thoughts," she nestled and
fitted with marvelous suppleness into a corner of the carriage, and
sank into a sweet sleep, with a red cheek, two wet eyelashes, and a
half-smile of the most heavenly character imaginable.
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