A man may do
as he likes occasionally."
They were walking toward the house, arm-in-arm, and Archie's step was
lighter, and his face brighter and handsomer than it had been in many a
day. Indeed, he was quite his old self as he entered the drawing room
and greeted his august aunt, who received him more graciously than, she
had his wife.
Just then Neil came in with Bessie, whom he took to his mother, saying:
"Look, mother, here is Bessie. Didn't I tell you she was a beauty?"
Then, as his mother merely inclined her head, he lifted the child in
his arms and held her close to the proud lips which touched the white
forehead coldly, while a frown darkened the lady's face, for
notwithstanding that Bessie was so young and Neil a mere boy, she
disapproved of the liking between them lest it should interfere with
Blanche. But Neil did not fancy Blanche, and he did like Bessie, and
took her in to dinner, holding her little hand while she skipped and
jumped at his side and looked up in his face with those great blue eyes
which moved him strangely now, and which in the after time were to
bewilder and intoxicate and awaken in him all the better impulses of his
nature and then become the sweetest and the saddest memory of his life.
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