"You seem very curious over my ring, Felise," she said, angrily. "I do not suppose it can matter to you at all who the giver may be."
"Oh! not in the least," said Felise, airily. "I beg your pardon for teasing you about it. But if someone should give me a prettier ring than that soon I should not mind telling you the donor. And by the way," said she, walking to the window and peering out through the lace curtains, "you must tell me, Bonnibel, how you liked Colonel Carlyle the other day."
"I should be very ungrateful if I did not like him very well," said the girl, simply. "He was very good to me."
"That is an evasive answer," said Felise, laughing. "Should you have liked him if you had not been prompted thereto by gratitude?"
"I am sure I do not know. I was suffering such acute pain I hardly thought of him until he told me he had been an intimate friend of my papa while in the army. And he praised papa so highly I could not choose but like him for his words."
"The cunning old fox," said Felise to herself, while she drew her black brows angrily together. "Already he has been trying to find the way to her heart."
"He is rather fine-looking for one who is certainly no longer young—don't you think so, Bonnibel?" pursued the wily girl.
"Certainly," said Bonnibel, willing to praise Colonel Carlyle because she thought it would please Felise; "he does not seem so very old, and he is quite handsome and stately-looking."
Whatever Felise might have replied to this was interrupted by the entrance of Lucy, Bonnibel's maid. A broad smile lighted her comely, good-natured features at the sight of the visitor.
"For you, miss," said she, going up to Bonnibel and putting in her hand a small volume of splendidly-bound poems and a rare hot-house bouquet, whose fragrance filled the room, and turning to Miss Herbert she added: "Colonel Carlyle is waiting in the drawing-room, Miss Herbert."