lently.

"Do you mean to say," cry I, looking rather aghast, and speaking, as
usual, without thinking, "that you mean _me_ to call you _Roger_!
indeed, I could not think of such a thing! it would sound so--so
_disrespectful_! I should as soon think of calling my father _James_."

"Should you?" he answers, turning away his face toward the garden-beds,
where the blue forget-me-not is unrolling her sky-colored sheet, and the
double daisies are stiffly parading their tight pink buttons. "Then call
me what you like!"

I am not learned in the variations of his voice, as I am in those of
father and Algy, in either of which I can at once detect each fine
inflection of anger, contest, or pain; but, comparatively unversed as I
am in it, there sounds to me a slight, carefully smothered, yet still
perceptible, intonation of disappointment--mortification. I wish that
the air would give me back my words; but that it never yet was known to
do.

"I will try if you like," say I, cheerfully, but a little shyly, as,
like the March Hare and the Hatter in the "Mad Sea Party," I move up
past the empty chairs to the one next him. "I do not see, after all, why
I should not get quite used to it in time! Roger! Roger! it is a name I
have always been very partial to until" (laughing a little) "the
Claimant threw discredit on all Rogers!"

He is looking at me again. After all, I must have been mistaken. There
is no shadow of disappointment or mortification near him. He is smiling
with some friendliness.

"You must never mind what _I_ say," I continue, dragging my wicker chair
along the shortly-shorn sward a little nearer to him. "_Never!_ nobody
ever does; I am a proverb and a by-word for my malapropos speeches.
Mother always _trembles_ when she hears me talking to a stranger. The
first day that I dined after you came, Algy made me a list of things
that I was not to talk about to you."

"A list of sore subjects?" says my lover, laughing. "But how did the boy
know what _were_ my sore subjects? What were they, Nancy?"

"Oh, I do not know! I have forgotten," reply I, in some confusion. "I've
made some very bad shots."

And so we slip away from the subject; but, all the same, I wish that I
had not said it.

We have come to the day before the wedding. My spirits, which held up
bravely during the first two weeks of my engagement, have now
fallen--fallen, like a wind at sundown. I am as limp, lachrymose, and
lamentable, a young woman as you