"But besides my father's anger—I am afraid he may, Frank," said the young girl, looking into her lover's face with real anxiety.
"I only wish he would!" was the reply.
"Why, you do not mean to say that you would fight him?"
"With the sword, if he has one—no!" he said. "Not with anything more dangerous than a piece of rattan. I would not mind polishing off his dainty hide with that! Besides, if I quarrelled with him, who made me? You! He sat too near you, and you not only talked with him but looked at him. What business had you to look at him? Eh?"
"Oh, you cruel fellow!" said the young girl, not disposed to scold more sharply, even at folly, when it had such a sediment of true love lying beneath the froth.
"Oh, you handsome torment!" was the reply of the lover, as he took that one auspicious moment to enfold the young girl in his arms and give her half a dozen warm, close, voluptuous kisses full on the lips—such kisses as people should never indulge in who do not know exactly the haven toward which they are sailing.
"What are you doing now, impudence!" uttered the thoroughly-kissed girl, making just so much resistance as seemed becoming, and yet meeting her lover nearly enough half-way to make the exercise rather exhilarating.
"What am I doing? 'Locking up' a 'form'—you know I am a printer!" said the young man, taking yet another "proof" of affection. But here the alarmed reader will be spared the succession of bad puns, peculiar to the printing-office, with which this specimen was followed, and which has probably been to some extent indulged in by every disciple of Faust more or less in love, since Adam worked off the first proof of his breakfast bill-of-fare, on the original hand-press, in one corner of the Garden of Eden.
The young man was yet standing with his arm around the waist of Emily, just within the door leading from the parlor into the hall, and yet other farewell kisses and reproaches might have been on the possible programme,—when both were startled by a sharp scream from Aunt Martha, who was yet standing on the piazza with the Colonel near her.
"Ough-ough-oh!"