an't get up to-day, mother. I'm awfully unwell--got a high
fever--_you'll_ have to go in and lend father a helping hand"; and so
she brought me a cup of tea and a piece of toast, and then went up to
take father's place while he ate his dinner.

I _guess_ she suspected I'd been done for again by the way those young
women laughed when she told them I was sick in bed: for she was pretty
cross when I sneaked down to tea, and didn't seem to worry about how I
felt. Well, I kept pretty quiet the rest of the season. There were
dances and sleighing parties, but I stayed away from them, and
attended strictly to business.

I don't know but that I might have begun to enjoy some peace of mind,
after the winter and part of the spring had passed without any very
awful catastrophe having occurred to me; but, some time in the latter
part of May, when the roses were just beginning to bloom, and
everything was lovely, a pretty cousin from some distant part of the
State came to spend a month at our house. I had never seen her before,
and you may imagine how I felt when she rushed at me and kissed me,
and called me her dear cousin John, just as if we had known each other
all the days of our lives. I think it was a constant surprise to her
to find that I was bashful. _She_ wasn't a bit so. It embarrassed me a
thousand times more to see how she would slyly watch out of the corner
of her laughing eye for the signs of my diffidence.

Well, of course, all the girls called on her, and boys too, as to
that, and I had to take her to return their visits, and I was in hot
water all the time. Before she went away, mother gave her a large
evening party. I behaved with my usual elegance of manner, stepping on
the ladies' trains and toes in dancing, calling them by other people's
names, and all those little courtesies for which I was so famous. I
even contrived to sit down where there was no chair, to the amusement
of the fellows. My cousin Susie was going away the next day. I was
dead in love with her, and my mind was taken up with the intention of
telling her so. I had not the faintest idea of whether she cared for
me or not. She had laughed at me and teased me mercilessly.

On the contrary, she had been very encouraging to Tom Todd, a young
lawyer of the place--a little snob, with self-conceit enough in his
dapper body for six larger men. This evening he had been particularly
attentive to her. Susie was pretty and quite an heiress, so I knew Tom
T