He
saw now, or thought he saw, that he had been making a mountain out of
a molehill. Probably it meant nothing at all. There was no real danger.
Beatrice liked him, no doubt; possibly she had even experienced a fit of
tenderness towards him. Such things come and such things go. Time is a
wonderful healer of moral distempers, and few young ladies endure the
chains of an undesirable attachment for a period of seven whole months.
It made him almost blush to think that this might be so, and that the
gratuitous extension of his misfortune to Beatrice might be nothing more
than the working of his own unconscious vanity--a vanity which, did she
know of it, would move her to angry laughter.
He remembered how once, when he was quite a young fellow, he had been
somewhat smitten with a certain lady, who certainly, if he might judge
from her words and acts, reciprocated the sentiment. And he remembered
also, how when he met that lady some months afterwards she treated him
with a cold indifference, indeed almost with an insolence, that quite
bewildered him, making him wonder how the same person could show in such
different lights, till at length, mortified and ashamed by his mistake,
he had gone away in a rage and seen her face no more.
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