Mrs. Flemming had the daintiest of dinners awaiting their return, and insisted that the boys should stay and spend the evening. Lieutenant Wilde, too, was of the party; but Miss Bernard, anxious to restore Louis’s self-respect, for the once neglected her handsome cousin, in order to devote herself more exclusively to the boy at her side. Accordingly it was no wonder that Louis, as he went up the hill in the starlight, had lost the memory of his brief mortification, in the thought of the pleasant hand-clasp which accompanied the words,—
“Till we meet in the Easter holidays then, Mr. Keith.”
“I say, Wing,” said Max, ruthlessly breaking in upon his meditations; “did you hear what Lieutenant Wilde was telling me, on the way up the hill?”
“No,” answered Louis, rousing himself from a vague but blissful dream of the future; “No; what was it?”
“Nothing very important,” said Max wickedly. “He only just happened to mention that Miss Bernard is going to be married next month.”
“What!” And Louis was all attention.
“Yes,” pursued Max remorselessly; “she’s going to be married to a man named Hiram Budge. Pretty name, isn’t it? Maybe she’d like to have you on hand, to act as one of the little boys that open the floral gates, to let the bride go through.”
This last thrust was more than Louis could bear. Pulling off his coat, he tossed it into a chair, with a carelessness quite at variance with his usual methodical precision. Then, turning on Max, he picked him up, kicking and struggling, laid him carefully in his bed, piled the blankets over him, threw the pillows on top of the blankets and seated himself on the pillows, saying,—
“Now, Max Eliot, I’m going to sit here till you promise never to speak of this day again, either to me or to anybody else, if I have to sit here till morning. Now promise.”
And Max promised.