; and then I have all the guarantee of your long acquaintance
with her."

"Oh," says Tita, "that is all very well. Franziska is an excellent girl,
as I have told you often--frank, kind, well educated, and unselfish. But
you cannot have fallen in love with her in three days?"

"Why not?" says this blunt-spoken young man.

"Because it is ridiculous. If I meddle in the affair I should probably
find you had given up the fancy in other three days; or if you did marry
her and took her to England you would get to hate me because I alone
should know that you had married the niece of an innkeeper."

"Well, I like that!" says he, with a flush in his face. "Do you think I
should care two straws whether my friends knew I had married the niece
of an innkeeper? I should show them Franziska. Wouldn't that be enough?
An innkeeper's niece! I wish the world had more of 'em, if they're like
Franziska."

"And besides," says Tita, "have you any notion as to how Franziska
herself would probably take this mad proposal?"

"No," says the young man, humbly. "I wanted you to try and find out what
she thought about me; and if, in time something were said about this
proposal, you might put in a word or two, you know, just to--to give
her an idea, you know, that you don't think it quite so mad, don't you
know?"

"Give me your hand, Charlie," says Tita, with a sudden burst of
kindness. "I'll do what I can for you; for I know she's a good girl, and
she will make a good wife to the man who marries her."

You will observe that this promise was given by a lady who never, in any
circumstances whatsoever, seeks to make up matches, who never speculates
on possible combinations when she invites young people to her house in
Surrey, and who is profoundly indignant, indeed, when such a charge is
preferred against her. Had she not, on that former Christmas morning,
repudiated with scorn the suggestion that Charlie might marry before
another year had passed? Had she not, in her wild confidence, staked
on a wager that assumption of authority in her household and out of it
without which life would be a burden to her? Yet no sooner was the name
of Franziska mentioned, and no sooner had she been reminded that Charlie
was going with us to Huferschingen, than the nimble little brain set to
work. Oftentimes it has occurred to one dispassionate spectator of her
ways that this same Tita resembled the small object which, thrown into
a dish of some liquid chemical