– began her escort.
"There! Drive on, and don't bother about me," said Patty. "I have usually been thought able to take care of my own affairs. A pleasant ride to you."
She turned back toward the lonely house. Bathalina Clemens was at work somewhere in the chambers, counteracting any tendency to too great cheerfulness which the beauty of the day might develop in her mind, by singing the most doleful of minors: —
"'Hearken, ye sprightly, and attend, ye vain ones;
Pause in your mirth, adversity consider;
Learn from a friend's pen sentimental, painful
Death-bed reflections,'"
she sang, with fearful inflections and quavers. Patty's face fell. A feeling of angry disappointment came over her. This picnic was an event in Montfield. What to the belle of the season would be the loss of its most brilliant ball was this privation to Patty. This is a relative world, wherein the magnitude of an object depends upon the position of the eye which observes it; and for the time being the picnic filled the whole field of mental vision of the young people of the village. Nor did it tend to lessen the girl's annoyance that the fault was her own, although she resolutely persisted in thinking that she thought herself not at all responsible, but had transferred the entire blame upon the shoulders of the cavalier who should have invited her, and had not. She wandered restlessly through the house and garden, at last seating herself upon the piazza with a book, upon which she vainly attempted to fix her attention. From above came the voice of Bathalina chanting, —
"'Shun my example!'"
"'Shun your example!'" muttered Patty to herself. "I shall shun my own hereafter. I might have known that poky old Tom Putnam wouldn't ask me. It is too mean that I should have to stay at home! He might at least have given me a chance to refuse him, and then I should have known what to count on. He is so intensely aggravating. I don't doubt he took Flora Sturtevant. I've no patience with a man that will let himself be trapped by a flirt like her."
And at that moment, raising her eyes, she saw the object of her animadversions – a tall, slender man of two or three and thirty – coming up the walk. He seemed surprised to find her at home.
"Good-morning," Mr. Putnam said, in a voice which few persons heard with indifference, so rich and pleasing it was. "I supposed you had gone to the picnic."
"You see I haven't."
It required no great penetration to see that Patty was out of spirits. The new-comer looked at her keenly.
"Thank you, I will sit down for a moment," he said, as if she had invited him to do so. "These steps are very comfortable. Don't trouble to get me a chair."
"I had not the faintest intention of doing so," she returned.
"Why have you not gone?" he asked, looking up at her curiously from his seat upon the piazza-steps.
"I chose to stay at home," she answered shortly.
"Conclusive, but impossible. A better reason, please?"
"I do not know that it can make any difference to you why I stay at home."
"But it does, however ignorant you may be on that point."
"Why should it?"
"You have not answered me," he said; "but I will be generous, and tell you why. I was coming yesterday to invite you myself, and heard that you were going with Burleigh Blood."
"Did you?" she asked, brightening visibly. "That was a lie I told, or rather a lie I didn't tell. How did you hear of it?"
"I heard Clarence Toxteth say so. Is your list of questions much longer?"
"If Bathalina doesn't stop singing such hymns," Patty said irrelevantly, "I know I shall murder her sooner or later."
"I would," he answered, looking at his watch. "I came for a book of your father's; but it is no matter to-day. I will have the horse at the gate in fifteen minutes. Can you be ready so soon?"
"Who said I'd go?" she laughed, springing up.
"Who asked you to?" he retorted.
"But I will, if only to plague you," she said.
"Don't feel obliged to," he replied, starting down the walk. "It really won't annoy me enough to make it worth your trouble."
Patty darted into the house, and up to her chamber, like a swallow. Unconsciously she caught up Bathalina's strain.
"'Sudden and awful, from the height of pleasure,
By pain and sickness thrown upon a down-bed,'"
she carolled; and for once the hymn put on a garb of mocking gayety.
"Patience Sanford!" solemnly ejaculated the pious maid-servant, putting her head in at the chamber-door. "It's tempting Providence to sing that hymn that way. No good'll come of it, you may depend."
"Nonsense, Bath! I could dance to the hymns of the cherubim!"
And into the garden she flew to pin a bunch of clove-pinks at her belt.
"Do you know how solemn you looked," Putnam asked as they drove along the smooth road, between unfenced fields green with the starting aftermath, "when I found you on the piazza? Were you thinking of your sins?"
"No: of those of my neighbors."
"Of omission, or commission?" he asked, looking at her closely.
"Both," she returned, flushing a little. "I was lonesome, of course. You wouldn't like to stay at home alone all day."
"On the contrary," he said, "there are few things I like better. It is strange how a woman is never good company for herself. She can never keep still and think, but must always be rattling away to somebody."
"You think so because you don't know."
"My observation has not been very extensive, perhaps; but it has been all in one direction. Men are content enough to be alone."
"It is all the conceit of the men," she retorted. "You all fancy you are never in so good company as when alone."
"Unless we are favored by some one of your sex."
"Nonsense! You don't think so. What a man finds to say to himself, I cannot imagine; unless, indeed, his mind is one grand vacuum."
"The wisdom of a man's reflections must always be beyond a woman's comprehension," he returned. "Some men have made great mistakes by forgetting this."
"Then, of course, you'll never marry," Patty ventured. "You wouldn't want a companion who couldn't understand you."
"Oh! I may join 'the noble army of martyrs,'" he answered in the same bantering tone he had been using. "Every man will be ruled by some women; and with a wife his resistance would be a trifle less restrained, you see."
"I have heard it said," she answered, "that, as love increased, good manners decreased; but I never made such an application of it."
"Of course," he began, "having a legal mind, I regard a wife as a piece of personal property, and" —
"There!" she interrupted. "It is perfectly
