looks entertained.
"What will you do? What will you say? Will you make use of the same excellently terse expression that you applied to me last night?"
"I should not wonder," reply I, bursting out into uncomfortable laughter; "but it is no use talking of what I shall do when I am down: I am not down yet; I wish I were."
"It is no great distance from the ground," he says, coming nearer the wall, standing close to where the apricot is showering down her white and pinky petals. "Are you afraid to jump? Surely not! Try! If you will, I will promise that you shall come to no hurt."
"But supposing that I knock you down?" say I, doubtfully. "I really am a good weight—heavier than you would think to look at me—and coming from such a height, I shall come with great force."
He smiles.
"I am willing to risk it; if you do knock me down, I can but get up again."
I require no warmer invitation. With arms extended, like the sails of a windmill, I hurl myself into the embrace of Sir Roger Tempest. The next moment I am standing beside him on the gravel-walk, red and breathless, but safe.
"I hope I did not hurt you much," I say with concern, turning toward him to make my acknowledgments, "but I really am very much obliged to you; I believe that, if you had not come by, I should have been left there till bedtime."
"It must have been a very unpleasant speech that you made to deserve so severe a punishment," he says, looking back at me, with a kindly and amused curiosity.
I do not gratify his inquisitiveness.
"It was something not quite polite," I answer, shortly.
We walk on in silence, side by side. My temper is ruffled. I am planning five distinct and lengthy vengeances against Bobby.
"I dare say," says my companion presently, "that you are wondering what brought me in here now—what attraction a kitchen-garden could have for me, at a time of year when not the most sanguine mind could expect to find any thing good to eat in it."
"At least, it is sheltered," I answer, shivering, thrusting my hands a little farther into the warm depths of my muff.
"I was thinking of old days," he says, with a hazy, wistful smile. "Ah! you have not come to the time of life for doing that yet. Do you know, I have not been here since your father and I were lads of eleven and twelve together?"
"You were eleven, and he was twelve, I am sure," say I, emphatically.
"Why?"
"You look so much younger than he," I answer, looking frankly and unembarrassedly up into his face.
"Do I?" (with a pleased smile). "It is clear, then, that one cannot judge of one's self; on the rare occasions when I look in the glass it seems to me that, in the course of the last five years, I have grown into a very old fogy."
"He looks as if he had been so much oftener vexed, and so much seldomer pleased than you do," continued I, mentally comparing the smooth though weather-beaten benignity of the straight-cut features beside me, with the austere and frown-puckered gravity of my father's.
"Does he?" he answers, with an air of half-surprised interest, as if the subject had never struck him in that light before. "Poor fellow! I am sorry if it is so. Ah, you see"—with a smile—"he has six more reasons for wrinkles than I have."
"You mean us, I suppose," I answer matter-of-factly. "As to that, I think he draws quite as many wrinkles on our faces as we do on his." Then, rather ashamed of my over-candor, I add, with hurried bluntness, "You have never been married, I suppose?"
He half turns away his head.
"No—not yet! I have not yet had that good fortune."
I am inwardly amused at the power of his denial. Surely, surely he might say in the words of Lancelot:
"Had I chosen to wed,
I had been wedded earlier, sweet Elaine."
"And you?" he asks, turning with an accent of playfulness toward me.
"Not yet," I answer, laughing, "and most likely I shall have to answer 'not yet' to that question as often as it is put to me till the end of the chapter."
"Why so?"
I shrug my shoulders.
"In moments of depression it strikes Barbara and me, that me and Tou Tou shall end by being three old cats together."
"Are you so anxious to be married?" he asks with an air of wonder, "in such a hurry to leave so happy a home?"
"Every one knows best where his own shoe pinches," I answer vernacularly. "I am afraid that it does not sound very lady-like, but since you ask me the question, I am rather anxious. Barbara is not: I am."
A shade of I cannot exactly say what emotion—it looks like disappointment, but surely it cannot be that—passes across the sunshine of his face.
"All my plans hinge on my marrying," I continue, feeling drawn, I do not know how or why, into confidential communication to this almost total stranger, "and what is more, on my marrying a rich man."
"And what are your plans?" he asks, with an air of benevolent interest, but that unexplained shade is still there.
"Their name is Legion," I answer; "you will be very tired before I get to the end of them."
"Try me."
"Firstly then," say I, narratively, "my husband must have a great deal of interest in several professions—the army, the navy, the bar—so as to give the boys a helping hand; then he must have some shooting—good shooting for them; for them all, that is, except Bobby! never shall he fire a gun in my preserves!"
My mind again wanders away to my vengeances, and I break off.
"Well!"
"He must also keep two or three horses for them to hunt: Algy loves hunting, but he hardly ever gets a day. He is so big, poor dear old boy, that nobody ever gives him a mount—"
"Yes?"
"Well, then, I should like to be able to have some nice parties—dancing and theatricals, and that sort of thing, for Barbara—father will never hardly let us have a soul here—and to buy her some pretty dresses to set off her beauty—"
"Yes?"
"And then I should like to have a nice, large, cheerful house, where mother could come and stay with me, for two or three months at a time, and get clear away from the worries of house-keeping and—" the tyranny of father, I am about to add, but pull myself up with a jerk, and substitute lamely and stammeringly "and—and—others."
"Any thing else?"
"I should not at all mind a donkey-carriage for Tou Tou, but I shall not insist upon that."
