Page:Authors daughter v1.djvu/169

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JESSIE LINDSAY'S DECLARATION.
165

what I have said, and I hope you'll mind some of it."

"I'll mind it all," said George, "but we cannot part like this." Jessie looked almost beautiful as she looked at him, and she loved him, so he thought there could be no harm in snatching a kiss. Without being at all in love with her, only having leadings in that direction, and having been long removed from that rural English society where he had spent his boyhood, where kisses were as plenty as blackberries and were given and taken without much being thought of them, the temptation to give a warmer farewell than mere hand-shaking was irresistible at the moment. But to Jessie Lindsay a kiss was a solemn thing—the seal of true love and of nothing else—to be given to the man she was to marry, but not until the troth was plighted. She drew back with an indignant blush and extended her free arm, for George held the other fast, to show how physical could support moral force, but Copeland understood the colour and escaped the threatened blow.

"Has anything I have said to you made you think that I'd allow of such a liberty " said she. "It is little you now Jessie Lindsay if you think she would have such goings on from a man that does not care for her, at