“Ah!” she said, blushing and embarrassed. “That I do not know—I think; but little Patty is no genius.”
The moment I was free, I hurried palpitating to my friend, and confessed all, and implored her, by the love between us, to play her part in the little innocent deception I had practised. She gazed at me with her sweet shocked eyes, as if I were inviting her to murder.
“You really meant them for him, for Father Pope?” she whispered, half choking. “O, Diana! It was blasphemy!”
“It was,” I said, “to waste the Princess Camilla on such a block.”
Then, as my friend still cried out, I knelt, and took her waist prisoner in my arms, and begged to her.
“I am not like you, darling. I pine and pinch in this cold air. If it was not for you, you little warm thing, I should run away with Giles, the handsome stable-boy.”
“Don’t,” she wept. “You don’t mean it. Say you only intended it for a joke!”
“Of course I only meant it for a joke,” I said, urging her; “though it’s true I believed the creature was expecting it of me. But ’tis a joke that will cost me dear if you don’t back me.”
“O!” she cried, despairing, “I do, I will. But how can I ever pretend to have wrote them, when that cat rhymes with lap is the best I know of verse.”
“You little dear,” I said, laughing in sheer love of her artlessness. “Pretend nothing, but hold your tongue.”