It was Miss Irma herself, taking a walk in a place where at such a time she had no business to be—on the little farm path that skirts the woods above the town. Louis was with her, but I thought that in the far distance I could discern the lounging shadow of the faithful Eben.
I stood speechless straight before her, but she passed on, lightly switching the crisped brown stalks of last year’s thistles with a little wand she had brought. I saw that she did not mean to speak to me, and I turned desperately to accompany her.
“I will thank you to pass your way,” she said sharply. “I am glad you are to have such a wife and such a dowry. Also a father-in-law who will be at the kind trouble of paying your college fees till you are quite ready to marry his daughter. It is a thing not much practised among gentlefolk, but, what with being so much with your mantua-makers, you will doubtless not know any better!”
“Irma—Irma,” I cried, not caring any more for Eben, now in the nearer distance, “it is all a mistake—indeed, a mistake from the beginning!”
“Very possibly,” she returned, with an airy haughtiness; “at any rate, it is no mistake of mine!”
And there, indeed, she had me. I had perforce to shift my ground.
“I am not going to marry Charlotte Anderson,” I said.
“Then the more shame of you to deceive her after all!” she cried. “It seems that you make a habit of it! Surely I am the last person to whom you ought to boast of that!”
“On the contrary, you are the first!”
But she passed on her way, her head high, an invincible lightness in the spring of every footstep, a splash of scarlet berries making a star among her dark hair, and humming the graceless lilt which told how—