"I must tell you something that happened last night. Well, I met Charlie as I was coming home from saying good-bye to you. He was desolate. You really have been a little cruel. He said you gave him back his match-box and gold pencil, and that that meant you did not want anything more to do with him. He said he had been waiting behind the usual shrubbery in the park for two hours, for a long last good-bye and that you never turned up. I know what you mean about him, that he isn't smart and clean and all that, but he is rather nice all the same. Almost the best we knew. I think the hair on his hands, as you pointed out, made up for a heap of other shortcomings in him. But I know what you mean. He's a little rough and there's an end of it. I thought of telling him to write to you; but then it struck me you would not like him to. He said you were a flirt, and that you would only have a rich man. I said it wasn't that a bit, that he had quite misunderstood you. I couldn't tell him the truth, could I?—that he wasn't altogether 'toothsome,' as you call it. He said he had seen us talking to that motor-cyclist fellow in the park last Saturday, and that proved it. I said it proved nothing, because we did not know then that he was one of the wealthiest boys in the county. However he seemed very bitter.
"Did you really give him so much encouragement? Of course men do think it a lot if you let them kiss you. Aren't they stupid? They can't understand that even if one does not love them overmuch one wants to know what it's like. And you did like pretending you were deeply in love, didn't you now?—all the time? I tell you who'll be glad you've gone, Alice Dewlap. She was sweet on Charlie long before you met him, because Kitty told me so.
"Oh, Leo, you were a wicked creature, a regular godsend! What shall we do without you! Do ask me to come soon. That's cool, isn't it? Asking for an invitation. But you know what I mean. Think of me in church next Sunday. Good Lord deliver us! Tell me what to say to Charlie if he bothers me about you again. And don't forget to tell me all that happens in London. Describe all the men you meet minutely,—you know to the smallest detail as you used to here. You taught me to notice heaps of things I should never have thought of.
"Good-bye my dearest treasure-trove, with heaps of love and kisses.
"Yours for ever and ever,
"Nessy."
The old gentleman lost sight of Leonetta during the lunch interval; but when she returned from the restaurant car, slightly flushed, and her eyelids lazily drooping, he concluded that she had probably partaken heartily of the good fare provided, more particularly as a few stray crumbs still clung about the corners of her lips, betraying to his experienced eye the unconscious eagerness which healthy people habitually show over their meals. Wisely he did not infer from these evidences of a youthful and unimpaired appetite that she was slovenly in her table manners, because the unmistakable gentleness of her upbringing precluded any such possibility. The observation merely confirmed his general impression of her, and left him pondering over the relationship of daintiness to health.
Drowsily the girl re-opened the letter which she had been perusing before the luncheon hour, and re-read it once or twice; then dropping it listlessly upon her lap, she turned upon her fellow-passengers a look of such guileless interest that they might have been excused had they been moved by that compassion, so frequently unwarranted, for innocence on the threshold of Life's great adventure.
The letter she held had been brought to her that morning by Vanessa's maid. Leonetta and Vanessa had made friends the moment they first met, and when Vanessa, duly qualified, had left the School of Domesticity, about six months after Leonetta's arrival there, they had continued to see each other outside its walls. There was a difference of only a year in their ages, Vanessa being the elder; but the younger girl with her greater keenness of vision, more exuberant health and spirits, and more resolute unscrupulosity, had so carried the heart of the other by storm that it was Vanessa, the provincial termagant, who looked up to and worshipped her sister dare-devil of the Metropolis, and who watched her for her every cue.