"Oh, saints and angels! only hear her. She will drive me mad—I know she will. Here I offer her my heart, and hand, and fortune (though I don't happen to have such a thing about me), and she begins talking about Sambo's toes. That girl will be the death of me. And when I die I'll charge them to place on my tombstone, 'Died from an overdose of a coquette.'"
And Master Archie stamped up and down, and flung his coat-tails about with an utterly distracted expression of countenance.
"Why, what nonsense are you going on with there?" inquired Gipsy, pausing in her task of comforting Sambo, and looking at him in surprise.
"Nonsense!" exclaimed Archie, pausing before her, and throwing himself into a tragic attitude. "Infatuated girl! the heart you now cast from you will haunt you in the dead hours of the night, when everything (but the mosquitoes) is sleeping; it will be ever before you in your English home, when you are the bride of Sir George (confound him!) Stuart; it will——"
But Master Archie could proceed no further; for Gipsy fell back in her chair, fairly screaming with laughter. Archie made a desperate effort to maintain his gravity, but the effort proved a failure, and he was forced to join Gipsy in an uproarious peal.
"Oh, dear!" said Gipsy, wiping her eyes, "I don't know when I have laughed so much."
"Yes," said Archie, in high dudgeon—"pretty thing to laugh at, too! After breaking my heart, to begin grinning about it. Humph!"
"You looked so funny—you looked——"
Gipsy's voice was lost in another fit of laughter.
"Come, now, Gipsy, like a good girl, don't laugh any more; but tell me, will you marry me—will you be my wife?"