le the
crimson feather of Fanny Meyrick, and "the whip that was a parasol."

"Shall I step out into the road this minute, and stop those ladies
like a peaceable highwayman, and tell them you have promised to marry
me, and that their anxiety as to our intimacy may be at rest? Give me
but leave and I will do it. It will make Mrs. Barton comfortable. Then
you and I can walk away into those beckoning woods, and I can have you
all to myself."

Indeed she was worth having. With the witchery that some girls know,
she had made a very picture of herself that morning, as I have
said. Some soft blue muslin stuff was caught up around her in airy
draperies--nothing stiff or frilled about her: all was soft and
flowing, from the falling sleeve that showed the fair curve of her arm
to the fold of her dress, the ruffle under which her little foot
was tapping, impatiently now. A little white hat with a curling blue
feather shaded her face--a face I won't trust myself to describe, save
by saying that it was the brightest and truest, as I then thought, in
all the world.

She said something rapidly in Italian--she is always artificial when
she uses a foreign tongue--and this I caught but imperfectly, but it
had a proverbial air about it of the error of too hasty assumptions.

"Well, now I'll tell you something," she said as the carriages
disappeared over the top of the hill. "Fanny Meyrick is going abroad
in October, and we shall not see her for ever so long."

Going abroad? Good gracious! That was the very thing I had to tell
her that morning--that I too was ordered abroad. An estate to be
settled--some bothering old claim that had been handed down from
generation to generation, and now springing into life again by the
lapsing of two lives on the other side. But how to tell her as she
looked up into my face with the half-pleading, half-imperious smile
that I knew so well? How to tell her _now_?

So I said nothing, but foolishly pushed the little pebbles aside with
my stick, fatuously waiting for the subject to pass. Of course my
silence brought an instant criticism: "Why, Charlie, what ails you?"

"Nothing. And really, Bessie, what is it to us whether Fanny Meyrick
go or stay?"

"I shouldn't have thought it _was_ anything. But your silence, your
confusion--Charlie, you do care a little for her, after all."

Two years ago, before Bessie and I had ever met, I had fluttered
around Fanny Meyrick for a season, attracted by her bright