I went down to him just as I was, in my simple piqué dress, wearing the violets he had given me. "Mr. Helmerston," said I, "I must apologize for the difficulty I have given you in obtaining the very slight boon of meeting me, and say how good you are to come again—and wait. Any friend of dearest Amelia's, not to mention her cousin, is—"
He had stood in a state of positive paralysis until now.
"Dolly! Dolly! Dearest, dearest Dolly!" he cried, coming up to me and taking—and doing what he hadn't had a chance to do before. "Oh, my darling, are you here?"
After quite a while he started up as if he had forgotten something.
"What is it?" said I. "There isn't a promenader or a policeman this side of the park, sweetheart!"
"No," he answered after another interval—for I hadn't called him anything like that before—"but I was thinking that—that Aurelia—is a long time in coming home."
"Why, don't you know yet, you goosey," said I. "I'm Aurelia!"
And this brings me to the point where dalliance must cease—most of the time—while the drama takes on the darker tinge given it by Pa's cruel obstinacy, and the misdeeds of the Pruntys—whom I should have brought on in the first act, somehow, on a darkened stage, conspiring across it over a black bottle, and once in a while getting up to peek up and down the flies, meanwhile uttering the villain's sibilant "Sh!" I don't suppose it is artistic, from the Augustus Thomas viewpoint, but I wanted the honeyed sweets of this courtship of mine without a tang of bitter; and, honestly now, isn't it a lovely little plot for a love-drama?