"So early! Yet I shall ride over from Tunbridge Wells to see you off."
"Thank you, Aurora; but at such an hour——"
"Oh, I shall not want for an escort, believe me. Major Shirley and a dozen others will only be too happy. And now that we are to be friends from henceforward, confess that you have been wrong, cousin Basil, and that I have been right!"
"Perhaps—it is the privilege of all handsome girls to be right, whatever view they take."
"Did you learn this in France?" she asked, with a steady glance.
"Ah!" said I, and with the thought of Jacqueline, my heart seemed to die within me; "in France I preserved your handkerchief (you remember our race on Banstead Heath), and it saved my life from a bullet at St. Malo."
Her soft, peachlike cheek flushed with honest pleasure when I said this, but ere she could reply, Major Shirley—a privileged man evidently was this devil of a major, and a very handsome one to boot—came forward, saying—
"Miss Gauntlet, I beg pardon, but I have been looking for you everywhere."
"Why?" asked Aurora, raising her eyebrows.
"You are forgetting the hour, and that I promised your mamma to see you safely back to Tunbridge Wells betimes."