Her
feeling about him was decidedly queer. She would not admit to herself
that she was in love with him or that she wanted to marry him, yet she
spent every minute when she was alone in wondering what he thought of
her, and in comparing what they had done to-day with what they had done
the day before.
"He didn't ask me to play, but he certainly followed me into the hall,"
she meditated, summing up the evening. She was thirty years of age,
and owing to the number of her sisters and the seclusion of life in a
country parsonage had as yet had no proposal of marriage. The hour of
confidences was often a sad one, and she had been known to jump into
bed, treating her hair unkindly, feeling herself overlooked by life in
comparison with others. She was a big, well-made woman, the red lying
upon her cheeks in patches that were too well defined, but her serious
anxiety gave her a kind of beauty.
She was just about to pull back the bed-clothes when she exclaimed, "Oh,
but I'm forgetting," and went to her writing-table. A brown volume lay
there stamped with the figure of the year. She proceeded to write in the
square ugly hand of a mature child, as she wrote daily year after year,
keeping the diaries, though she seldom looked at them.
"A.M.--Talked to Mrs. H. Elliot about country neighbours. She knows the
Manns; also the Selby-Carroways.
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