k, and a
maid-servant, and a postman that passed the gate twenty times for
twice that he opened it, and nothing to look for but this disappointing
creature day after day! At first she was shy, stole out a coy line
of fingers to be shaken, and lisped; and out of that mood came
right-about-face, with an exclamation of regret that she supposed she
must not kiss me now. I projected, she drew back. 'Shall Janet go?'
said I. 'Then if nobody's present I 'll be talked of,' said she, moaning
queerly. The tendency of her hair to creep loose of its bands gave her
handsome face an aspect deliriously wild. I complimented her on her
keeping so fresh, in spite of her salt-water widowhood. She turned the
tables on me for looking so powerful, though I was dying for a foreign
princess.

'Oh! but that'll blow over,' she said; 'anything blows over as long
as you don't go up to the altar'; and she eyed her ringed finger,
woebegone, and flashed the pleasantest of smiles with the name of her
William. Heriot, whom she always called Walter Heriot, was, she informed
me, staying at Durstan Hall, the new great house, built on a plot of
ground that the Lancashire millionaire had caught up, while the squire
and the other landowners of the neighbourhood were sleeping. 'And if you
get Walter Heriot to come to you, Harry Richmond, it'll be better for
him, I'm sure,' she added, and naively:

'I 'd like to meet him up at the Grange.' Temple, she said, had left the
Navy and was reading in London for the Bar--good news to me.

'You have not told us anything about your princess, Harry,' Janet
observed on the ride home.

'Do you take her for a real person, Janet?'

'One thinks of her as a snow-mountain you've been admiring.'

'Very well; so let her be.'

'Is she kind and good?'

'Yes.'

'Does she ride well?'

'She rides remarkably well.'

'She 's fair, I suppose?'

'Janet, if I saw you married to Temple, it would be the second great
wish of my heart.'

'Harry, you're a bit too cruel, as Julia would say.'

'Have you noticed she gets more and more Irish?'

'Perhaps she finds it is liked. Some women can adapt themselves... they
're the happiest. All I meant to ask you is, whether your princess is
like the rest of us?'

'Not at all,' said I, unconscious of hurting.

'Never mind. Don't be hard on Julia. She has the making of a good
woman--a girl can see that; only she can't bear loneliness, and doesn't
understand yet what it is to be loved