Molly shakes her head, but says nothing, and there is a long pause.
"I wish you could have found time to go up to the Rosery with me, Molly," Hugh says at length. "It was so cool and pleasant. I think it would have done you good after the hot day."
A little gasping kind of sigh, then, "I _could_ have gone if I had chosen," says truthful Molly. "It was all humbug about the business."
"I don't know," says Molly, and again there is silence.
"And so you think I have changed so much?" queries Hugh presently.
"Yes, that is just it," replies Molly more briskly. "You _do_ seem to have become so--so _different_ somehow."
"Well, I hardly know, Hugh--and yet I _do_ know; only I don't like to say."
"Say away," he says, leaning back in his chair and laughing. "_I_ won't mind."
"O, it is nothing disparaging," and Molly takes her hat off and swings it round. "The fact is you seem so--so dreadfully _old_ now to what you were. Do you know," she adds, sinking her voice and nodding in her old way, "I felt quite afraid of you when I came into the drawing-room and peeped at you from behind Honor; I did indeed. Then there was your moustache, too. It makes you look quite severe, and I could not help wondering how I ever had the face to lecture and blow you up as I did in the old days. But you seemed so boyish then to what you do now. The alteration quite startled me at first."
"I am awfully sorry, Molly. But you didn't expect me to go on being boyish to the end of my days, did you? You see, I have knocked about the world a little now: I don't mean as to distance; that has to come," he adds with a little sigh. "But since I joined my regiment I have, of course, been thrown much more into the society of men--men much older than myself mostly, and I suppose the life altogether does change a fellow. My mother says the same as you, Molly. But notwithstanding the ferocious appearance that my moustache gives me generally," he goes on after a pause, "I assure you I am just the same in heart as ever. Just the same old playmate and companion if you will let me be, and as ready and anxious for lectures and scoldings from my little mentor as ever; so I hope she will not throw me over as a bad job, now that I am no longer a _boy_. Now, do you know, I think _I_ have more reason to complain of the change in _you_, Molly, of the two. What with your long frocks and your turned-up hair, and--oh, lots of things, really you are quite alarming to contemplate. You have grown so tall, too; why, I don't believe I am a head taller than you now, and I was a good deal more, you know."