"Mine and that of my friend, Miss Browne. I have decided that we shall both be taken at the same time and in the same style."
"Oh."
It was a sort of ecstatic sigh drawn from the bottom of his heart--wherever that may have been.
The two girls glanced at each other.
"I had the pleasure of meeting Miss Browne a few days ago," stammered Clement. He felt that he was making a great idiot of himself.
"I have told Miss Collumpton," said Cecilia, "how much I owed to your kindness on that occasion."
"For Mora's sake, Mr. Fildew," said Miss Browne, "I am glad to be able to thank you in person for the service you rendered her. She was coming up to town to stay with me at the time you met her."
"How well she acts her part," said Cecilia, to herself, with an admiring glance at her friend. "And how well she would carry out such a part in real life."
Clem muttered something about the service he had rendered being a very slight one, after which he took a rather hurried leave. He was glad to get out into the cold, wintry afternoon. It seemed to him that he walked home that day as the gods of old are fabled to have walked--on ambient air. Surely those were not the cold, slushy streets of dreary, commonplace London. Everything seemed as if it had been touched by a necromancer's wand.
"Mora." He whispered the word to himself again and again. What a sweet and romantic name it was! He did not venture to say, even to himself, that Mora's surname was either sweet or romantic. But that surname should be changed for another, by and by, or he would know the reason why.