difficulty in diagnosing them, having observed them in the demeanor of
young men before now. The case was otherwise with Canning, to whom his
own unsteadinesses were a continuing amazement. Heart-whole he had
reached his thirtieth year, and his present enterprise had furnished him
with the surprise of his life. He was, indeed, a man who had lately
looked upon a miracle. He had watched three humiliating rebuffs turn
under his eye, as it were, to so many powerful lodestones. He himself
hardly understood it, but it was a truth that no degree of cunning on
the part of this girl could have so captured his imagination as her
spirited independence of him (in mamma's vocabulary, her flare-up). A
man who held himself naturally high, he had been irresistibly magnetized
by her repulses of him. Rebuffed, he had sworn to go near her no more,
and had turned again, an astonishment to himself, and tamely rung
her bell....

Canning looked and looked at Carlisle across the little table, and it
was as if more miracles went on within him. Not inexperienced with the
snarers, he had learned wariness; and now, by some white magic, wariness
seemed not worth bothering for. If marriage was to come in question, his
dispassionate judgment could name women clearly more suitable; but now
dispassionateness was a professor's mean thumb-rule, too far below to
consider. Of a sudden, as he watched her loveliness, all his instincts
clamored that here and now was his worthy bride: one, too, still
perilously not broken to his bit. But ... Was it, after all, possible?
Was it conceivable that this unknown small-capitalist's daughter, rated
so carelessly only the other day, was the destined partner of his high
estate?...

"I can't bear to think of your going to-night," he exclaimed suddenly,
with almost boyish eagerness. "You know this town is home to me. I can't