A Private Chivalry

COMPARING it with the fortnight of yesterdays, Brant reckoned the day of his meeting with Dorothy as one worthy of anniversaries. In good truth, his confession had stopped something short of its climax, and of the coveted personal absolution; but it was comforting to remember that he had spoken plainly, and that she had bidden him go forward hopefully. Notwithstanding the untimely interruption, there could be no reasonable doubt of the major fact: that she fully understood his parable and its application -- understood and was glad, and would have let him go on but for the interruption.

So much for the good; and as for the ill, the rebuff at the church gate went for little. Being so well assured of the daughter's -- he was about to say "love," but he changed it to "sympathy" -- being so well assured of the daughter's sympathy, he could afford to wait for reinstatement in the good graces of the mother. Women, even such women as the Mrs. Langfords, are not implacable, he reasoned; and when he should have shown how sincere he was, her resentment -- her natural resentment, he was willing to call it -- would be allayed, and she would see the injustice of her sentence of ostracism. Wherein he showed forth an unknowledge of womankind common to very young men, and to some older ones whose walk in life has led them much apart from women worth the knowing.