“I will. I’ll remind him again in my next letter—or when I see him. I’ll say, ‘Don’t forget to invite Mr. Reynolds in the winter.’ Will that do?”
“Oh, yes, that will do beautifully! But it is a long time to wait,” sighed the girl.
I thought she was much too young to be in love, when she was still in short frocks and wore her hair in a pigtail; but I was obliged to help her, in return for the service I wanted her to do me.
“I have brought my letter,” said I mysteriously. “Shall you be writing soon?”
“I have a letter ready now, and I will put yours inside and give it to a gentleman who is here, and who is going back to London directly after tea, and I will ask him to post it at once.”
“Oh, thank you!” said I; and tremblingly, with fear lest the dreaded Alice should get hold of it, I put my letter into her hands, and soon afterwards left the house.
The fog was already so much thicker that I wondered whether the gentleman with our letter would be able to find his way back to London that night, and even whether I could find mine back to the Alders. I must be sure to keep to the drive in crossing the park. But, before I got to that, I lost myself among the garden-paths, and walked into a flower-bed; and I began to think I should have to find my way back to the door and ask ignominiously to be led to the gate, when I heard voices on my left; and I made my way recklessly in their direction across grass, flower-beds, and everything. I could not see the speakers yet, for there was a hedge or something between us; but I could distinguish that they were the voices of a young man and a young woman of the lower class. Thinking one of them at least must be a servant at the Hall, and able to direct me, I was just going to speak through the hedge, when a few words in the man’s voice stopped me.
“I have had enough of you Norfolk girls; you are too stand-off for me.”
It was the voice of Tom Parkes.
“Yes, to such weather-cocks as you,” answered the girl, with rough coquetry. “Why, you were keeping company with that ugly Sarah at Mr. Rayner’s; and, now she is ill, you want to take up with me. Oh, a fine sweetheart you’d make!”