o. However, smiling peace is now again restored to us, and no one, to
look at us, as we sit in my boudoir after breakfast, would think that
we, or perhaps I should say I, had been so lately employed in chasing
her away. As little would any one, looking at the blandness of Vick's
profile, as she slumbers on the window-seat in the sun, conjecture of
her master-passion for the calves of strangers' legs.

"So you see that I _must_ go, Nancy," says Roger, with a rather wistful
appeal to my reason, of whose supremacy he is not, perhaps, quite so
confident as he was when he got up this morning. "You understand, don't
you, dear?"

I nod.

"Yes, I understand."

I still speak in a subdued and snuffly voice, but the wrath has gone out
of me.

"Well, you--would you mind," he says, speaking rather hesitatingly, as
not quite sure of the reception that his proposition may meet
with--"would you mind coming with me as far as Zephine's?"

"Do you mean come all the way, and go in with you, and stay while you
are there?" cry I, with great animation, as a picture of the strict
supervision which, by this course of conduct, I shall be enabled to
exercise over Mrs. Zephine's oscillades, poses, and little verbal
tendernesses, flashes before my mind's eye.

Roger looks down.

"I do not know about _that_," he says, slowly. "Perhaps she would not
care to go into her husband's liabilities before a--a str--before a
third person!"

"Two is company and three is none, in fact," say I, with a slight
relapse into the disdainful and snorting mood.

He looks distressed, but attempts no argument or explanation.

"How far did you mean me to come, then?" say I, half ashamed of my
humors, but still with an after-thought of pettishness in my voice.
"Escort you to the hall-door, I suppose, and kick my heels among the
laurestines until such time as all Mr. Huntley's bills are paid?"

He turns away.

"It is of no consequence," he says, with a slight shade of impatience,
and a stronger shade of disappointment in his voice. "I see that you do
not wish it, but what I meant was, that you might have walked with me as
far as the gate, so that on this first day we might lose as little of
each other's society as possible."

"And so I will!" cry I, impulsively, with a rush of tardy repentance.
"I--I--_meant_ to come all along. I was only--only--_joking_!"

But to both of us it seems but a sorry jest. We set forth, and walk side
by side through the park.