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She was utterly without defence and on the verge of tears. Her novels, her criterions of conduct had never suggested that a girl might have to shield herself physically from a proposal of marriage.

The indignity of the girl dodging from him behind the green plush chair stopped the jeweller quite as much as her frightened whispers and white face. He put one of his hands on hers on the back of the chair and renewed his persuasions more coherently.

"Nessie, I know we will be happy together! You don't love me now but you will! I'd be so careful of you, Nessie, so devoted—at least the old Coltrane place would give you a—a home and a—a background. There's something aristocratic about the old house, just as there is about you! Old Judge Coltrane was an aristocrat!"

This time the name Coltrane set up in Nessie an obscure recollection, "Coltrane!" she thought, "Coltrane!" And it flashed on her that old Judge Coltrane had been Abner Teeftallow's grandfather!

Suddenly the tragic romance of the old-style Southern novel spread itself before the girl. Belshue was the villain; he had disinherited Abner!

But the jeweller caught the hand under his and was drawing her toward him.

"Nessie, I love you more than my life! I'm in misery without you."

At the jeweller's outburst of passion, he wavered in Nessie's mind between villain and hero. Her novel-reading had left her inextricably mixed. She had expected something clear-cut. Now she wavered between equivocal impulses—to jerk away and fly his reddened, middle-aged face; to yield herself, after all, into his arms. A vague something had awakened in her at this roughness: pity, tenderness, the dawn of passion, his patient, long-continued goodnesses to her when no one else even glanced at her. After all, why not? She let his arms go about her, but with a feeling mixed with shame, and somehow with grotesqueness . . .