Bluebell's eyes opened in horror at this unpalatable suggestion. "What are you dreaming of, Lilla?" gasped she. "Cecil! why she looks upon him as an uncle or something."
"Oh, Bluebell, you blind little bat, it would be as well if you looked upon him 'as an uncle or something.'"
But the other sat aghast and speechless. Lily glanced at her sympathetically.
"Well, perhaps he mayn't care for Cecil. He has been talking nonsense to you, too, I see, as he has to us all three, for that matter. I feel so angry about it, I have a great mind to tell you all he said to me."
"I don't want to hear," said her companion, coldly; "nor do I at all agree with you about Cecil"
"All right," returned the other. "Only remember he can't afford to marry, whatever he may have pretended to you—not but what that subject is about the last it ever occurs to him to enter upon."
Bluebell at first utterly refused to receive this intolerable suggestion into her mind. Lilla must be inventing—in love with him herself, and trying to make mischief. Nothing should induce her to believe it. How irritating she was, too, with that knowing, quizzing expression in her face!
So when Cecil, tired of solitude, proposed coming into their boat, Bluebell eagerly took possession of the canoe, and went off on an independent paddle, ostensibly to look for Miss Prosody.