for an indefinite length of time, during which she would live at Stoneleigh, and he would visit her often.  But Bessie shrank from this proposal, and when Neil asked what she was to do there alone, she answered that she could do very well until her mother came, and then they would manage together somehow on the little there was left, and if nothing better offered she could go out as governess to small children.  But this plan Neil repudiated with scorn.  His wife must never be a governess, never earn her own bread!  The idea was preposterous; and then he talked of the bright future before them if they waited patiently, and how happy he would make her; and in the morning he left her and went back to London, and she was alone again, and looking anxiously forward to news from her mother, and the day after Neil left a letter came from Daisy with the blackest and deepest of borders, and Bessie opened it eagerly to learn where she was, and when she was coming home.

CHAPTER XXI.

WHAT DAISY DID.

She flirted with every man on the ship who would flirt with her.  Even Allen Browne was not insensible to her charms.  During the last few months he had developed amazingly, and had put on all the airs of a first-class dandy.  He parted his hair in the middle, carried an eye-glass and a cane, wore a long overcoat, and pants so tight that it was a matter of speculation with his friends how he ever got into them, or being in, how he ever got out!  His last purchase in London had been a pair of pointed shoes, which were just coming into vogue, as was the species of the male gender called “dudes.”

“A dudle I call ’em, and think ’em too shaller for, anything,” was Mrs. Rossiter-Browne’s comment, and she looked a little askance at her son, wondering how he would impress the Ridgevillians at home, and especially what Miss Boughton would think of him.  “I wouldn’t make a ’tarnel fool of myself if ’twas the fashion,” she said to him when the pointed toes appeared.

But Allen had his own ideas, and, encouraged by Daisy, who, though wonderfully amused at his appearance, told him he was “tout-a-fait parisien,” he followed his own inclinations, and, arrayed in all his finery, made himself the laughing-stock of the passengers.  But he did not care so long as Daisy smiled upon him, and allowed him to attend her.  He walked with her on deck and brought her chair for her, and her shawl, and rug, and wrapped her feet carefully, and held the umbrella over her head to screen her from the wind, and hovered over her constantly, leaving his mother to stagger, or rather crawl up the stairs as best she could, with her rug, and shawl, and waterproof, and saw her umbrella turned inside out, and carried out to sea, without offering her any assistance, even when, as she expressed it, she was “sick enough to die.”