“There!” cried Fanny, “I knew it.”

“I believe I am.”

“Listen to him, Redbud!”

“She knows it,” said Verty.

“Hum!  I don’t see how anybody can help knowing it.”

“Why?”

“Because it is plain.”

“Ah!”

“Yes, sir; this very moment you showed it.”

“Yes—­I believe I did.”

“Odious old thing!”

“Who?”

“Why, Miss Sallianna, sir—­I don’t care if you are paying your addresses!  I say she’s an odious old thing!—­to be giving herself airs, and setting her cap at all our beaux!”

Verty stared, and then laughed.

“Miss Sallianna!” he cried.

“Yes, sir!”

“I’m in love with her!”

“You’ve just acknowledged it.”

“Acknowledged it!”

“There! you’re going to deny your own words, like the rest of your fine sex—­the men.”

“No—­I did’nt say I was in love with Miss Sallianna.”

“Did’nt he, Redbud?” asked Fanny, appealing to her friend.

“No,” said Verty, before she could reply; “I said I was in love with Redbud!”

And the ingenuous face of the young man was covered with blushes.

Fanny fairly shook with laughter.

“Oh,” she screamed, “and you think I am going to believe that—­when you spend the first half an hour of your visit with Miss Sallianna—­talking, I suppose, about the ‘beauties of nature!’”

And the young girl clapped her hands.

“I wanted”—­commenced Verty—­

“Oh, don’t tell me what you wanted!” cried Fanny; “you saw in the garden here two nice young girls, if I do say it—­”

“You may—!”

“I am not to be led off in that way, sir!  I say you saw two agreeable young ladies here evidently not indisposed to talk with visitors, as it’s a holiday—­and in spite of that, you pass your time in the house with that old Sallianna, cooing and wooing and brewing,” added Miss Fanny, inventing a new meaning for an old word on the spur of the moment, “and after that you expect us to believe you when you say you are not in love with her—­though what you see to like in that old thing it would take a thousand million sybils, to say nothing of oracles and Pythonesses, to explain!”

With which exhausting display of erudition, Miss Fanny lay back on her trellised seat, and shook from the point of her slippers to the curls on her forehead with a rush of laughter.

Redbud had recovered from her momentary confusion, and, with a beseeching glance at Fanny, said to Verty: 

“How much better you look, Verty, in this dress—­indeed you look more homelike.”

“Do I?” said the happy Verty, bending his head over his shoulder to admire the general effect; “well, I feel better.”

“I should think so.”

“The other clothes were like a turkey blind.”

“A turkey blind?”

“Oh, you smile!—­but you know, when you are lying in the blind, the pine limbs rub against you.”