But she settled this part of the question very promptly.
"I like him better than anybody I have ever seen," she said to herself.
"In fact, I love him, and now--" and then she went on to consider the rest of the matter, which was not so easy to settle.
Cicely Drane was terribly hard to settle.

There was that girl,--all the more dangerous because, being charming and little, a man would be more apt to treat her as a good comrade than if she were charming and tall,--who was with him all the time.

And how she would be with him, Dora's imagination readily perceived, because she knew how she herself would be with him under the circumstances.

Before breakfast in the dewy grass, gathering apples; during work hours, talking through the open window as he chanced to pass; after five o'clock, walks in the orchard, walks over the farm, in the woods everywhere, and always those two together, because there were four of them.

How much worse it was that there were four of them! And the evenings, moonlight, starlight; on the piazza; good-night on the stairs--it was maddening to think of.
But, nevertheless, she thought of it hour after hour, with no other result than to become more and more convinced that she was truly in love with a man who had never given any sign that he loved her, and that there was every reason to believe that when he gave a sign that he loved, it would be to another woman, and not to her.
She rose and looked out of the window.