“Then you shall live at the foot.”
“Dine and I,” she answered audaciously.
“Not Dine! She has gone away from us; she would rather listen to a love-ditty from the lips of her new acquaintance than a volume of sober sense from us.”
“I had not thought to be jealous. She is not taking any thing from me.”
“Be careful; never tell her any thing again; if you write to her that Mary wears a black silk to-night, and that Nan has geranium leaves in her hair, she will run and tell him. She will never keep another secret for you.”
Tessa looked grave. She never would be supreme in her little sister’s heart again. Perhaps this evening she had arrayed herself in garnet and gone with him to the mite society, and was laughing and playing games, fox and geese, or ninepins, in somebody’s little whitewashed parlor, forgetting that such a place as Dunellen was down upon the map.
“Gus, we want you,” said Mary Sherwood, approaching them. “The girls are having a quarrel about who wrote something; now, go and tease them to your heart’s content.”
“Wrote what?” asked Tessa.
“Oh, I don’t know. Why are you so still? You are sitting here as stately and grand and pale and intellectual—one must be pale to look intellectual, I suppose—as if you had written Middlemarch. I thought that you never went home without a separate talk with every person in the room, and there you sit like a turtle in a shell. What change has passed over the spirit of your dream?”
“I feel quiet; I feel as if I were afraid that some one would push against me if I should attempt to cross the room.”