As my Lady Castlewood and her son and daughter passed through one door of the saloon where they had all been seated, my Lord Castlewood departed by another issue; and then the demure eyes looked up from the tambour-frame on which they had persisted hitherto in examining the innocent violets and jonquils. The eyes looked up at Harry Warrington, who stood at an ancestral portrait under the great fireplace. He had gathered a great heap of blushes (those flowers which bloom so rarely after gentlefolks’ springtime), and with them ornamented his honest countenance, his cheeks, his forehead, nay, his youthful ears.

“Why did you refuse to go with our aunt, cousin?” asked the lady of the tambour frame.

“Because your ladyship bade me stay,” answered the lad.

“I bid you stay! La! child! What one says in fun, you take in earnest! Are all you Virginian gentlemen so obsequious as to fancy every idle word a lady says is a command? Virginia must be a pleasant country for our sex if it be so!”

“You said — when — when we walked in the terrace two nights since — O heaven!” cried Harry, with a voice trembling with emotion.

“Ah, that sweet night, cousin!” cries the Tambour-frame.

“Whe — whe — when you gave me this rose from your own neck,”— roared out Harry, pulling suddenly a crumpled and decayed vegetable from his waistcoat —“which I will never part with — with, no, by heavens, whilst this heart continues to beat! You said, ‘Harry, if your aunt asks you to go away, you will go, and if you go, you will forget me.’— Didn’t you say so?”

“All men forget!” said the Virgin, with a sigh.

“In this cold selfish country they may, cousin, not in ours,” continues Harry, yet in the same state of exaltation —“I had rather have lost an arm almost than refused the old lady. I tell you it went to my heart to say no to her, and she so kind to me, and who had been the means of introducing me to — to — O heaven!”

(Here a kick to an intervening spaniel, which flies yelping from before the fire, and a rapid advance on the tambour-frame.) “Look here, cousin! If you were to bid me jump out of yonder window, I should do it; or murder, I should do it.”

“La! but you need not squeeze one’s hand so, you silly child!” remarks Maria.

“I can’t help it — we are so in the south. Where my heart is, I can’t help speaking my mind out, cousin — and you know where that heart is! Ever since that evening — that — O heaven! I tell you I have hardly slept since — I want to do something — to distinguish myself — to be ever so great. I wish there was giants, Maria, as I have read of in-in books, that I could go and fight ’em. I wish you was in distress, that I might help you, somehow. I wish you wanted my blood, that I might spend every drop of it for you. And when you told me not to go with Madame Bernstein . . .”

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