"Twice as much. What has she got to do with it?"
"Well, a great deal, I take it,"—laughing again.
"As a friend she may feel some interest in him, I suppose. But she is not going to marry him."
"Well, I think she is. You don't think she will refuse him, do you?"—anxiously.
"Cissy Redmond!"
"Cissy Redmond."
"Do you mean to tell me," says Clarissa, growing very red, "that it is Cissy you have been talking about all this time, and not—yourself?"
"Myself! What on earth are you thinking of?" It is now Georgie's turn to blush crimson, and she does it very generously. Then she breaks into wild mirth, and, laying her head on Clarissa's knees, laughs till she nearly cries. "Oh, when I think of all I have said!" she goes on, the keenest enjoyment in her tone,—"how I praised myself, and how cavalierly I treated his proposal, and—what was it I said about asking him to name the wedding-day? Oh, Clarissa, what a dear you are!—and what a goose!"
"Well, certainly, I never was so taken in in my life," confesses Miss Peyton, and then she laughs too, and presently is as deeply interested in Cissy's lover as if he had indeed been Georgie's.