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Allen, Grant, 1848-1899

"The Woman Who Did"

His own throbbing heart told him so as he sat
and talked with her. He thrilled at her approach. Bit by bit the
idea rose up in his mind that this lonely soul might still be won.
He set to work in earnest to woo and win her.
As for Herminia, many men had paid her attentions already in her
unwedded widowhood. Some of them, after the fashion of men, having
heard garbled versions of her tragic story, and seeking to gain
some base advantage for themselves from their knowledge of her
past, strove to assail her crudely. Them, with unerring womanly
instinct, she early discerned, and with unerring feminine tact,
undeceived and humbled. Others, genuinely attracted by her beauty
and her patience, paid real court to her heart; but all these fell
far short of her ideal standard. With Harvey Kynaston it was
different. She admired him as a thinker; she liked him as a man;
and she felt from the first moment that no friend, since Alan died,
had stirred her pulse so deeply as he did.
For some months they met often at the Fabian meetings and
elsewhere; till at last it became a habit with them to spend their
Sunday mornings on some breezy wold in the country together.


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