Neil, on the contrary, forgave her fully for the annoyance he had felt, and immediately after breakfast the next morning he started for Mrs. Buncher’s.  Bessie was trying on the hat when he entered.  She had received the box only a few moments before, and had readily guessed that Neil was the donor, and had in part divined his motive.

“He was ashamed of my old gown and hat; and they are rather the worse for the wear, and looked very shabby among the fine dresses in the park.  But they are the best I have, unless I make over those mother sent me—­and that I cannot do,” she thought, as she remembered, with a pang, the trunkful of half-worn garments of various kinds, which her mother had sent her from time to time, and which she could never bring herself to wear, because of the association.  They had been worn in the moral mire of Monte Carlo and other places equally disreputable, and Bessie could no more have put them on than she could have adopted her mother’s habits.  In her linen dress, which she bought with money paid her for roses by the ladies who frequented the “George,” she felt pure and respectable.  But this gift from Neil, her cousin, she surely might keep, for her father said so, and, young-girl-like, she was admiring herself, or rather the hat, before the glass, when Neil himself came in.

“Hallo, Dot,” he said, coming quickly to her side.  “At it, I see, like the rest of your kind; but don’t it become you, though!  Why, you are sweet and fresh this morning as a rose from the old Stoneleigh garden,” and the tall young man stooped and kissed the blushing girl two or three times before she could withdraw herself from him.  “Why, Bess,” he continued, “what a lump of dignity you are this morning!  You did not used to wriggle so when I kissed you.  What has happened?”

“Nothing has happened,” Bessie replied, though she knew very well there had, for what Jack Trevellian had told her that rumor said of Neil and Blanche had opened a new channel of thought, and made her older far than she was before; too old for Neil to be kissing her as if she were a child.

And then, if what Jack said was true, he had no right to kiss her, even if she were his cousin.  But was it true?  She wished she knew, and after she had thanked Neil for the dress, and asked if he were very angry with her the day before for trying to attract his attention, and he had assured her that he was not, she burst out: 

“Oh, Neil, is it true you are to marry Miss Blanche?  Mr. Jack Trevellian stood by us yesterday and told me who the people were, and he said—­”

“Jack be hanged!” Neil interrupted her.  “What business has he to talk such nonsense to you?  Marry Blanche?  Never!  What do I want of those light eyebrows and that pointed chin—­I, who know you?”