Chapter Nine.
“I wonder,” mused St. John, stroking Jill’s tumbled hair with his right hand, and holding both hers in his left, “why the governor should have come here and told you what he did? It was putting us all in such a false position, and—well, I should have considered it an act altogether beneath him.”
Jill sighed and nestled unconsciously a little closer to him.
“Can’t we forget all that for to-day,” she asked, “and just think only of our two selves? I quite believe you when you say that you are not engaged to your cousin. I think I believed it all along only I was so horribly jealous. I’m jealous still, jealous that she can see you when I can’t, and that she has a right to call you Jack—”
“But you have got that right too,” he interrupted, “a better right than she has. You will call me Jack, won’t you? I call you Jill.”
She laughed.
“Doesn’t it put you in mind of the nursery rhyme?” she said. “I never thought of it before.”
“Yes; let’s see, how does it go? We must alter it a little to fit the case, ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill to—’ we can’t say ‘fetch a pail of water.’”