upset Metelill's chances."

Isa clung to me in floods of tears, desiring me not to believe
anything so cruel and false. Every one always was so hard upon her,
she said, and she had only put the thing inadvertently there, to get
it out of sight, into the first book she saw, but unfortunately she
did not know I had heard her trying to pass it off to Charley as a
jest. However, as there was no proof there, I asked about the
parasol. While the shopping was going on, she and young Horne had
been in another street, and this was the consequence! I was
perfectly confounded. Receive presents from young men! It seemed
to me quite impossible. "Oh, Isa thinks nothing of that!" said
Charley. "Ask her where she got those bangles, and that bouquet
which she told you was half Metelill's. You think me awful, I know,
Aunt Charlotte, but I do draw a line, though I would never have said
one word about it if she had not played this nasty trick on
Metelill." Isa would have begun some imploring excuse, but our two
gentlemen were seen coming up towards the window, and she fled,
gasping out an entreaty that I would not tell Uncle Martyn.

Nor did I then and there, for I needed to understand the matter and
look into it, so I told Martyn and Horace not to wait for me, and
heard Charley's story more coolly. I had thought that Mr. Horne was
Metelill's friend. "So he was at first," Charley said, "but he is
an uncommon goose, and Isa is no end of a hand at doing the pathetic
poverty-stricken orphan! That's the way she gets so many presents!"
Then she explained, in her select slang, that young Horne's love
affairs were the great amusement of his fellow-pupils, and that she,
being sure that the parasol was no present from me, as Isa had given
the cousins to understand, had set Bertie Elwood to extract the
truth by teasing his friend. "But I never meant to have told," said
Charley, "if you had not come in upon us, when I was in the midst of
such a wax that I did not know what I was saying"; and on my
demanding what she meant by the elegant expression she had used
about Isa and me, she explained that it was the schoolboy's word for
currying favour. Every one but we stupid elders perceived the game,
nay, even the Druces, living in full confidence with their children,
knew what was going on. I have never spoken, but somehow people
must read through one's brains, for there was a general conviction
that I was going to choose a niece to acco