“You ah the light of me eyes and the joy of me haaht!” murmurs a recent graduate from a boarding-school, languidly inserting a dessert-spoon the while she regards this young man—not yet far advanced in his teens, to be sure—as benignly as if he were about the size of Maggie, there.
“Let ’em help themselves,” he mutters in disgust, setting down the basket directly, and joining Marie where she is seated at the foot of a tree. “I can stand half a day in a swamp and poke amongst blackberry briers till my hands resemble the map of Germany done in red chalk, but I can’t go that sort of thing. Let’s wish.”
Master Harry has not been many seconds in divesting of its edible surroundings that part of the fowl which is known to all as the “wish-bone,” and which the slender fingers of the “popinjay” always manage to break in her favor.
“Say, now, what did you wish? (You have to tell, you know.) That there would be another war or revolution right off, so you could have a chance to show your courage?”
“Now you needn’t make any more fun of my courage. But I don’t care if you do think I’m a coward. I belong to somebody that was brave as a lion. He was a duke, or marquis, or something. For, you see, we didn’t live in this country in the time of the Revolution.”
“Oh!”
“No, we lived in France, and belonged to the nobility. I’ve been asking grandpa all about it, and he told me such a splendid story.
“Grandpa” (she has approached the old gentleman in a pause of the debate he is having with the Lieutenant and some others, on the subject of French politics), “Grandpa, won’t you tell us that story you told me one evening, about your great-uncle, who was a duke, or marquis, or something?”
Just now a sunbeam, resting on the little head, turns the long raven “mane” to purple. Purple hair! Strange Aunt Sophia never noticed it before, all these years! She leans forward with a sudden look of interest. Must Marie owe it to the dukes and marquises that she is to grow in favor with that lady?