“You have been very foolish, Frank,” said my kind old friend; “but I will try what I can do for you. You ought to have known that she did not care for Mr Mawley—not in the way you mean; and, as for marrying him, why, the curate himself does not dream of such a thing. I cannot imagine how you could have been so blind!”
“But you will help me, Miss Pimpernell, won’t you?” I entreated.
“Well, my boy, I will tell Minnie what you have just told me about your delusion, and say that you are very sorry for having treated her so badly.”
“And tell her,” I interposed, “that she’s dearer to me than ever.”
“I will do nothing of the sort,” hastily replied the old lady. “I am not going to give Miss Spight another chance of calling me ‘a wretched old match-maker,’ as she did once! No, Master Frank, you must do all your love-making yourself, my boy. I did not tell you that Minnie cares for you, you know; and, I can’t say whether she does, or no. She’s only very unhappy at your considering her no longer in the light of a friend, and has said nothing to lead me to imagine anything more than that. She would not have spoken to me at all about it, I’m confident, if she had not happened to have seen you only a moment before, and had her sensitive little heart wounded by your coldness! Why don’t you tell her yourself, Frank, what you wish me to say for you?”
“So I would, Miss Pimpernell, at once,” I replied, “if I only had an opportunity; but I never get a chance of seeing her alone.”
“Why don’t you make one, Frank?” said she. “For a young fellow of the day, you are wonderfully bashful and shy, not to be able to tell the girl of your heart that you love her! I declare, if I had only done what they wanted me, I would have proposed for half of the wives of the present married men of my acquaintance! When I was a girl, gentlemen seemed to have twice the ardour about them that they have now! You are all, now-a-days, like a pack of boarding-school misses, and have to be as tenderly coaxed on into proposing, as if you were the wooed and not the wooers. You don’t understand what ladies like,” continued the old lady, who, like most elderly maidens, had a strong spice of the romantic in her composition; “they prefer having their affections taken by assault instead of all this shilly-shallying and faint-heartedness. If I had had my choice, when I thought, as girls will think, of such things, I would have liked my lover to carry me off like those gallant knights did in the good old days that we read of!”
“And had him prosecuted for abduction,” said I, laughing at her enthusiasm.
“Well, well, Frank,” she said, laughing too, “I don’t mean to advise you to go to that extent; yet, you might easily find an opportunity to speak to Minnie Clyde, if you only set your wits to work. There’s the school treat on Thursday, won’t that do for you?”
“Really,” I replied, “I never thought of that, Miss Pimpernell; indeed I had made up my mind not to go; and—”