h
talking about than mine."

She stole a glance at her companion which said plainly enough, "The name
is yours." Allan advanced a step nearer to her, and lowered his voice,
without the slightest necessity, to a mysterious whisper. Miss Milroy
instantly resumed her investigation of the ground. She looked at it with
such extraordinary interest that a geologist might have suspected her of
scientific flirtation with the superficial strata.

"What name are you thinking of?" asked Allan.

Miss Milroy addressed her answer, in the form of a remark, to the
superficial strata--and let them do what they liked with it, in their
capacity of conductors of sound. "If I had been a man," she said, "I
should so like to have been called Allan!"

She felt his eyes on her as she spoke, and, turning her head aside,
became absorbed in the graining of the panel at the back of the
carriage. "How beautiful it is!" she exclaimed, with a sudden outburst
of interest in the vast subject of varnish. "I wonder how they do it?"

Man persists, and woman yields. Allan declined to shift the ground from
love-making to coach-making. Miss Milroy dropped the subject.

"Call me by my name, if you really like it," he whispered, persuasively.
"Call me 'Allan' for once; just to try."

She hesitated with a heightened color and a charming smile, and shook
her head. "I couldn't just yet," she answered, softly.

"May I call you Neelie? Is it too soon?"

She looked at him again, with a sudden disturbance about the bosom of
her dress, and a sudden flash of tenderness in her dark-gray eyes.

"You know best," she said, faintly, in a whisper.

The inevitable answer was on the tip of Allan's tongue. At the very
instant, however, when he opened his lips, the abhorrent high tenor of
Pedgift Junior, shouting for "Mr. Armadale," rang cheerfully through the
quiet air. At the same moment, from the other side of the carriage, the
lurid spectacles of the Reverend Samuel showed themselves officiously on
the search; and the voice of the Reverend Samuel's mother (who had, with
great dexterity, put the two ideas of the presence of water and a sudden
movement among the company together) inquired distractedly if anybody
was drowned? Sentiment flies and Love shudders at all demonstrations of
the noisy kind. Allan said: "Damn it," and rejoined young Pedgift. Miss
Milroy sighed, and took refuge with her father.

"I've done it, Mr. Armadale!" cried young Pedgift, greeting his p