She had not much leisure to ponder the question, for her attention was called off to answer present demands.  And there was another subject for pondering —­ Winthrop did not seem like the same person she had known under the same name, he was so much more free and pleasant and bright to talk than he had ever been to her before, or in her observation, to anybody.  He talked to a very silent listener, albeit she lost never a word nor a tone.  She wondered at him and at everything, and stepped along wondering, with a heart too full to speak, almost too full to hide its agitation.

They were nearing home, they had got quit of the woodway road, and were in a cleared field, grown with tall cedars, which skirted the river.  Half way across it, Elizabeth’s foot paused, and came to a full stop.  What was the matter?

Elizabeth faced round a little, as if addressing her judge, though she spoke without lifting her eyes.

“Mr. Landholm —­ do you know that I am full of faults?”

“Yes.”

“And aren’t you afraid of them?”

“No, —­ not at all,” he said, smiling, Elizabeth knew.  But she answered very gravely,

“I am.”

“Which is the best reason in the world why I should not be.  It is written ‘Blessed is the man that feareth always.’”

“I am afraid —­ you don’t know me.”

“I don’t know,” said he smiling.  “You haven’t told me anything new yet.”

“I am afraid you think of me, somehow, better than I deserve.”

“What is the remedy for that?”

Elizabeth hesitated, with an instant’s vexed consciousness of his provoking coolness; then looking up met his eye for a second, laughed, and went on perfectly contented.  But she wondered with a little secret mortification, that Winthrop was as perfectly at home and at his ease in the newly established relations between them as if they had subsisted for six months.  “Is it nothing new to him?” she said to herself.  “Did he know that it only depended on him to speak? —­ or is it his way with all the world?” It was not that she was undervalued, or slightly regarded, but valued and regarded with such unchanged self-possession.  Meanwhile they reached the edge of the woodland, from which the house and garden were to be seen close at hand.

“Stay here,” said Winthrop; —­ “I will carry this basket in and let them know you may be expected to breakfast.”

“But if you do that, —­” said Elizabeth colouring —­

“What then?”

“I don’t know what they will think.”

“They may think what they have a mind,” said he with a little bit of a smile again.  “I want to speak to you.”

Elizabeth winced a bit.  He was gone, and she stood thinking, among other things, that he might have asked what she would like.  And how did he know but breakfast was ready then?  Or did he know everything?  And how quietly and unqualifiedly, to be sure, he had taken her consignment that morning.  She did not know whether to like it or not like it, —­ till she saw him coming again from the house.