' "Do you think Dane will like to have you dress as you do?" 'so ran her thoughts. 'Well,how do I dress?'
She sat looking into the soft silence of the October air, feeling that for her life was changing fast. The old bounds to her action had somehow now stretched out to take in her will; her own pleasure now often in the mood to wait, uncertain of its choice, till she knew the pleasure of somebody else. There was the least bit of rebellion at this here and there; and yet on the whole Wych Hazel by no means wished herself back in the old times when nobody cared. Ah how lonely she had been!and how full the world seemed now, with that secret sense of happiness pervading all things! Meanwhile, as Prim had said, what was she going to do about dress?
It happened that the first interruption to her meditations came from a visiter who did not intend to be a guest. No less than Gov. Powder; a portly, gentlemanly, somewhat imposing personage, who was less known to society than were his wife and daughters. However, without wife and daughters, here he was.
'Good morning, my dear, good morning!' he began blandly, shaking Wych Hazel's hand with a sort of paternal-official benignity. 'Your guardian has not come upon the scene yet? I thought I should find him here. Why how cool you look, for October!'
'Yes, sirI like to look cool,' said Hazel, conscious that she could not always accomplish the feat. 'Especially when I have the world on my hands. Just now I am undefended., Gov. Powder; but I suppose both my guardians will be here by and by.'
'What do you do with two guardians, eh? Keep 'em both in good humour?'
'One at a time is as much as I often try for,' said Hazel. 'But Gov. Powder, I wish you would let me have a little fun right over the heads of them both.'
'I?' said the ex-governor, somewhat surprised. 'Eh? It does not often happen to me now-a-days to have the honour of such an appealunless from my own mad daughters. In what direction do you want me to come over your guardians, Miss Kennedy? and which of them?'
'O it is nothing mad at all, in my case,' said Hazel. 'And neither of them must know. But will you walk a little way down the wood with me, sir? I do not want them even to see a consultation.'
A man must be much set in his own purposes who would not go more than 'a little way' after such a voice; and Gov. Powder was but an ordinary man. So, finding the white ruffles a very pretty sort of a convoy, the ex-governor strolled down among the golden hickories and ruddy oaks, and never once guessed that he had a siren at his elbow.