'Your wedding dress?'
'Ah be quiet!' said Hazel. 'I am talking sense. Is your imagination too exhausted to bring you back to the land of reality?'
'I am speaking the most commonplace sense I possess. If Prim was not referring to your wedding dress, what did she mean?'
'That is just what I do not quite know. Prim asked that all of a sudden, and I said, I did not know what she meant by "do;" and she said "manage;" and I said I never managed. And then she saidat least asked'
'What?' said Dane, a trifle imperatively.
'Whether I thought you would like to have me dress as I do,'said
Hazel in a low voice.
The gray eyes took quick account of several items in the little lady's attire, then turned away; and Dane remarked that 'Prim had meant no harm.'
'No, not a bit. But it puzzled me,and I looked down at my dress, justas you did now. And Prim said, of course she did not mean what I wore then, but that I always dressed so beautifully. And then I thought,' said Hazel with the laugh in her voice, 'that maybe she thought it was wrong to have one's dress hang right. And next morning I was naughty enough to pull out her loopings and do them over. Then I asked her if she felt demoralized, or something. And Prim wanted to know if I thought she meant that? and bade me look at your dress. Which I have, very often,' Hazel added with a shy glance, 'but I do not find that it gives me any help about my own.'
Dane rewarded this speech with a look of grave deliberation, which ended with the corners of his mouth breaking into all manner of lines of fun. Hazel smiled too, partly at him, partly at herself.
'You see what always happens when I talk out,' she said. 'I am sure to be laughed at for my "confidence," as you call it. But Mr. Rollo, I did not much mind what Prim said. Not a bit, only for two little things.'