had it never been repeated

The kiss was, indeed, a decisive factor in the situation, and had shed a rosy, if somewhat fictitious light of romance over the past three weeks. Perhaps even the kiss, had it never been repeated, might have lapsed into its true perspective, in due course of time, had it not been for the sudden appearance of the stranger in the Wilson pew. The moment that Patty's gaze fell upon that fashionably dressed, instantaneously disliked girl, Marquis Wilson's stock rose twenty points in the market. She ceased, in a jiffy, to weigh and consider and criticize the young man, but regarded him with wholly new eyes. His figure was better than she had realized, his smile more interesting, his manners more attractive, his eyelashes longer; in a word, he had suddenly grown desirable. A month ago she could have observed, with idle and alien curiosity, the spectacle of his thumb drawing nearer to another (feminine) thumb, on the page of the Watts and Select Hymn book; now, at the morning service, she had wished nothing so much as to put Mark's thumb back into his pocket where it belonged, and slap the girl's thumb smartly and soundly as it deserved. The ignorant cause of Patty's distress was a certain Annabel Franklin, the daughter of a cousin of Mrs. Wilson's. Mark had stayed at the Franklin house during his three weeks' visit in Boston, where he had gone on business for his father. The young people had naturally seen much of each other and Mark's inflammable fancy had been so kindled by Annabel's doll-like charms that he had persuaded her to accompany him to his home and get a taste of country life in Maine. Such is man, such is human nature, and such is life, that Mark had no sooner got the whilom object of his affections under his own roof than she began to pall. Annabel was twenty-three, and to tell the truth she had palled before, more than once. She was so amiable, so well-finished,--with her smooth flaxen hair, her neat nose, her buttonhole of a mouth, and her trim shape,--that she appealed to the opposite sex quite generally and irresistibly as a worthy helpmate. The only trouble was that she began to bore her suitors somewhat too early in the game, and they never got far enough to propose marriage.