"And you kept it to yourself all this time!"
"How could I show it to you before? You had hardly been in the house two minutes when papa came home with Mr. Kiss and Mr. Linton. Then there was Bob hanging about, and you know how he scowls when I speak lovingly of Fred—I beg his pardon, Mr. Frederick Cornwall. Then there was helping mother with the tea. Then there was the reading of the play. Then there were the songs. With all that excitement, the letter went clean out of my head—except that I thought you would like it all the better if we read it together quietly here, where nobody can disturb us."
"You are a dear, good girl!"
"Of course I am, and you're another." Whereupon the cousins, with their arms round each other's necks, fondly embraced. They were sitting now on the bed very cosily, side by side. "Phœbe, I have something very horrifying to tell you."
"He hasn't met with an accident—he isn't ill?" exclaimed Phœbe, turning pale.
"Not a bit of it. He is as well as five feet eleven, aged six-and-twenty, should be. No, it isn't that; but it is about him, though."
"Tell me, Fanny."
"For a long time I have had my suspicions, but I wouldn't venture to breathe them to you. I watched mamma; I watched papa. When we were talking of him—it was always I who brought up his name—I set traps for them, and they fell into them unsuspiciously. And then there was what mamma said, in a pretended off-hand way, this morning, when she gave me the letter from Fred. It amounts to this, Phœbe"—she dropped her voice, and said in a whisper—"they think he comes after me!"
"Why shouldn't he, dear?"
"Why should he, dear?"