"Because you are just seven-and-twenty; and because there is 'Richard Conway' printed in white letters upon the black trunks you left at Norfolk," she replied, with an air of funny malice, adding, "at least so your servant told the cook, and the cook told my maid, and my maid told me, dear cousin; and so there's my 'how.'"
"Good heaven, this babbling is very provoking!" I exclaimed, greatly annoyed; "it may spoil all our plans."
"No fear," she answered; "we are so surrounded by woods and wilds that the secret will keep till next Sunday at least; for the negroes will not see those of any other plantation till then."
"And you will tell no one?" I inquired.
"Honour!" she replied, in a tone of mock solemnity.
"If you do," I said, laughing. "I will tell your uncle, whom I see coming up there, that you and I have been standing this quarter of an hour at the edge of the porch, talking of love all the time."
"Love!" she cried, "what is that? I declare such an antediluvian monster has never been once mentioned between us till you brought it this minute out of the blue mud of your own imagination."
"A very savoury figure," I answered. "But as to love, if we have not been talking about it, notwithstanding all circumlocutions, we have been thinking about it."
"Not a bit," she replied. "We have been talking, and thinking too, of the most opposite things--of the very antipodes of love. Courtship and marriage, if you like; but what has love to do with them, cousin?" And she fixed her full dark eyes upon my face, with a look of the most perfect simplicity--assumed, of course, but very well put on. I felt somewhat revengeful, and I almost longed to try if I could not make the boasting little beauty know something of the power she scoffed at. But just then Mr. Thornton came up, and began jesting with his fair relation upon her morning reveries beside the stream.
"I saw you, Bessy," he said; "and if I had met with Mr. Howard, I should have sent him down to try if he could not break up your visions."