“That is too bad!  Why didn’t you tell us of it before?  Is it painful?  I’m so sorry!”

“N-no—­it doesn’t hurt much.  I dare say it will be all right in a minute.  And then—­I’d just as soon stay here—­with you—­as to walk anywhere.”

This very tenderly, with a little sigh.

Hattie sat down again, and began to talk to this factitious cripple in the pleasant, purring way some damsels have, about the joys of the sea-shore, the happy summer that was, alas! drawing to a close, her own enjoyment of life, and kindred topics, till Charley saw an excellent opportunity to interrupt with some aspirations of his own, which, he averred, must be realized before his life would be considered a satisfactory success.

If you had ever been placed in analogous circumstances, you know, of course, just about the sort of thing that was being said by the two gentlemen at nearly the same moment:  Ned, loitering slowly along the sands with Laura on his arm, and Charley, stretched in indolent picturesqueness upon the rocks, with Hattie sitting beside him.  If you do not know from experience, ask any candid friend who has been through the form and ceremony of an orthodox proposal.

When the pedestrians returned the two couples looked very hard at each other.  All were smiling and complacent, but devoid of any strange or unusual expression.  Indeed, the countenance is subject to such severe education, in good society, that one almost always looks smiling and complacent.  Demonstration is not fashionable, and a man must preserve the same demeanor over the loss of a wife or a glove-button, over the gift of a heart’s whole devotion or a bundle of cigars.  Under all these visitations the complacent smile is in favor as the neatest, most serviceable, and convenient form of non-committalism.

The sun was approaching the blue range of misty hills that bounded the mainland swamps by this time; so the skipper was signalled, the dinner paraphernalia gathered up, and the party were soon en route for home once more.  When the young ladies were safely in, Ned and Charley met in their room, and each caught the other looking at him stealthily.  Both smiled.

“Did I give you time, Charley?” asked Ned; “we came back rather soon.”

“Oh, yes; plenty of time.”

“Did you—­aw, did you pop?

“Y-yes.  Did you?”

“Well—­yes.”

“And you were—­”

“Rejected, by Jove!”

“So was I!”

The day following this disastrous picnic the baggage of Mr. Edwin Salsbury and Mr. Charles Burnham was sent to the depot at Wikhasset Station, and they presented themselves at the hotel-office with a request for their bill.  As Jerry Swayne deposited their key upon its hook, he drew forth a small tri-cornered billet from the pigeon-hole beneath, and presented it.

“Left for you this morning, gentlemen.”

It was directed to both, and Charley read it over Ned’s shoulder.  It ran thus: