"No doubt. Life would naturally be insupportable without you. Whatever I may have lost, Mr. Stuart, it is quite evident you have not lost the most striking trait in your character—your self-conceit."
"No," the young man answered; "my virtues are as lasting as they are numerous. May I ask, how it is that I have suddenly become 'Mr. Stuart,' when it has been 'Charley' and 'dear Cousin Charley' for the past two years?"
Miss Darrell laughed a little and blushed a little again, showing very white teeth and lovely color.
"I have been reading Trixy's letter, and it fills me with an awful respect for you and all the Stuart family. How could I presume to address as plain Charley any one so fortunate as the bosom friend of a baronet?"
"Ah!" Mr. Stuart remarked, placidly; "Trixy's been giving you a quarter quire crossed sheets of that, has she? You really wade through that poor child's interminable epistles, do you? I hardly know which to admire most, the genius that can write twenty pages of—nothing—or the patience which reads it, word for word. This one is Sir Victor from date to signature, I'll swear. Well, yes, Miss Darrell, I know the baronet, and he's a very heavy swell and a blue diamond of the first water. Talk of pedigree, there's a pedigree, if you like. A Catheron, of Catheron, was hand and glove with Alfred the Great. He's a very lucky young fellow, and why the gods should have singled him out as the recipient of their favors, and left me in the cold, is a problem I can't solve. He's a baronet, he has more thousands a year, and more houses in more counties than you, with your limited knowledge of arithmetic, could count. He has a fair complexion, a melancholy contrast on that point to you, my poor Edith; he has incipient, pale, yellow whiskers, he has an English accent, and he goes through life mostly in a suit of Oxford mixture and a round felt hat. He's a very fine fellow, and I approve of him. Need I say more?"
"More would be superfluous. If you approve of him, my lord, all is said in that. And Lady Helena?"
"Lady Helena is a ponderous and venerable matron, in black silks, Chantilly lace, and marabout feathers, who would weigh down sixteen of you and me, and who worships the ground her nephew walks on. She is the daughter of a marquis and a peeress in her own right. Think of that, you poor, little, half-civilized Yankee girl, and blush to remember you never had an ancestor. But why do I waste my breath and time in these details, when Trix has narrated them already by the cubic foot. Miss Darrell, you may be a mermaid or a kelpie—that sort of young person does exist, I believe, in a perpetual shower bath, but I regret to inform you I am mortal—very mortal—subject to melancholy colds in the head, and depressing attacks of influenza. At the present moment, my patent leather boots are leaking at every pore, the garments I wear beneath this gray overcoat are saturated, and little rills of rain water are trickling down the small of my back. You nursed me through one prolonged siege of fever and freezing—unless you are especially desirous of nursing me through another, perhaps we had better get out of this. I merely throw out the suggestion—it's a matter of indifference to me."
Edith laughed and turned to go.
"As it is by no means a matter of indifference to me, I move an adjournment to the house. No, thank you, I don't want your arm. This isn't the fashionable side of Broadway, at four o'clock of a summer afternoon. I talk of it, as though I had been there—I who never was farther than Boston in my life, and who, judging from present appearances, never will."
"Then," said Mr. Stuart, "it's very rash and premature to judge by present appearances, my errand here being to—Miss Darrell, doesn't it strike you to inquire what my errand here may be?"