“Oh no!  She couldn’t behave badly;—­it isn’t in her.  But she can bowl a fellow over in the most—­well, most desperate manner.  As for me, I’m not worth my salt since I first saw her.  When I go to ride with the governor I haven’t a word to say to him,” But this ended in Mrs. Mountjoy going and promising that she would send Florence down in her place.  She knew that it would be in vain; but to a young man who had behaved so well as Mr. Anderson so much could not be refused.  “Here I am again,” he said, very much like Punch in the pantomime.

“Oh, Mr. Anderson! how do you do?”

A lover who is anxious to prevail with a lady should always hold up his head.  Where is the writer of novels, or of human nature, who does not know as much as that?  And yet the man who is in love, truly in love, never does hold up his head very high.  It is the man who is not in love who does so.  Nevertheless it does sometimes happen that the true lover obtains his reward.  In this case it was not observed to be so.  But now Mr. Anderson was sure of his fate, so that there was no encouragement to him to make any attempt at holding up his head.  “I have come once more to see you,” he said.

“I am sure it gives mamma so much pleasure.”

“Mrs. Mountjoy is very kind.  But it hasn’t been for her.  The truth is, I couldn’t settle down in this world without having another interview.”

“What am I to say, Mr. Anderson?”

“I’ll just tell you how it all is.  You know what my prospects are.”  She did not quite remember, but she bowed to him.  “You must know, because I told you.  There is nothing I kept concealed.”  Again she bowed.  “There can be no possible family reason for my going to Kamtchatka.”

“Kamtchatka!”

“Yes, indeed;—­the F.O.” (The F.O. always meant the Foreign Office.) “The F.O. wants a young man on whom it can thoroughly depend to go to Kamtchatka.  The allowances are handsome enough, but the allowances are nothing to me.”

“Why should you go?”

“It is for you to decide.  Yes, you can detain me.  If I go to that bleak and barren desert, it will merely be to court exile from that quarter of the globe in which you and I would have to live together and not separate.  That I cannot stand.  In Kamtchatka—­Well, there is no knowing what may happen to me then.”

“But I’m engaged to be married to Mr. Annesley.”

“You told me something of that before.”

“But it’s all fixed.  Mamma will tell you.  It’s to be this day fortnight.  If you’d only stay and come as one of my friends.”

Surely such a proposition as this is the unkindest that any young lady can make; but we believe that it is made not unfrequently.  In the present case it received no reply.