'Leonard,' she said softly and solemnly, 'might not that some day
be?'

Leonard, in addition to being an egotist and the very incarnation of
selfishness, was a prig of the first water. He had been reared
altogether in convention. Home life and Eton and Christchurch had
taught him many things, wise as well as foolish; but had tended to
fix his conviction that affairs of the heart should proceed on
adamantine lines of conventional decorum. It never even occurred to
him that a lady could so far step from the confines of convention as
to take the initiative in a matter of affection. In his blind
ignorance he blundered brutally. He struck better than he knew, as,
meaning only to pass safely by an awkward conversational corner, he
replied:

'No jolly fear of that! You're too much of a boss for me!' The
words and the levity with which they were spoken struck the girl as
with a whip. She turned for an instant as pale as ashes; then the
red blood rushed from her heart, and face and neck were dyed crimson.
It was not a blush, it was a suffusion. In his ignorance Leonard
thought it was the former, and went on with what he considered his
teasing.

'Oh yes! You know you always want to engineer a chap your own way
and make him do just as you wish. The man who has the happiness of
marrying you, Stephen, will have a hard row to hoe!' His 'chaff'
with its utter want of refinement seemed to her, in her high-strung
earnest condition, nothing short of brutal, and for a few seconds
produced a feeling of repellence. But it is in the nature of things
that opposition of any kind arouses the fighting instinct of a