Here was unwholesome talk!  Here was an empty stomach feeding on an unquiet mind!  My answer—­a pretty sharp one, in the poor girl’s own interests, I promise you!—­was at my tongue’s end, when it was snapped short off on a sudden by a voice among the sand-hills shouting for me by my name.  “Betteredge!” cries the voice, “where are you?” “Here!” I shouted out in return, without a notion in my mind of who it was.  Rosanna started to her feet, and stood looking towards the voice.  I was just thinking of getting on my own legs next, when I was staggered by a sudden change in the girl’s face.

Her complexion turned of a beautiful red, which I had never seen in it before; she brightened all over with a kind of speechless and breathless surprise.  “Who is it?” I asked.  Rosanna gave me back my own question.  “Oh! who is it?” she said softly, more to herself than to me.  I twisted round on the sand and looked behind me.  There, coming out on us from among the hills, was a bright-eyed young gentleman, dressed in a beautiful fawn-coloured suit, with gloves and hat to match, with a rose in his button-hole, and a smile on his face that might have set the Shivering Sand itself smiling at him in return.  Before I could get on my legs, he plumped down on the sand by the side of me, put his arm round my neck, foreign fashion, and gave me a hug that fairly squeezed the breath out of my body.  “Dear old Betteredge!” says he.  “I owe you seven-and-sixpence.  Now do you know who I am?”

Lord bless us and save us!  Here—­four good hours before we expected him—­was Mr. Franklin Blake!

Before I could say a word, I saw Mr. Franklin, a little surprised to all appearance, look up from me to Rosanna.  Following his lead, I looked at the girl too.  She was blushing of a deeper red than ever, seemingly at having caught Mr. Franklin’s eye; and she turned and left us suddenly, in a confusion quite unaccountable to my mind, without either making her curtsey to the gentleman or saying a word to me.  Very unlike her usual self:  a civiller and better-behaved servant, in general, you never met with.

“That’s an odd girl,” says Mr. Franklin.  “I wonder what she sees in me to surprise her?”

“I suppose, sir,” I answered, drolling on our young gentleman’s Continental education, “it’s the varnish from foreign parts.”

I set down here Mr. Franklin’s careless question, and my foolish answer, as a consolation and encouragement to all stupid people—­it being, as I have remarked, a great satisfaction to our inferior fellow-creatures to find that their betters are, on occasions, no brighter than they are.  Neither Mr. Franklin, with his wonderful foreign training, nor I, with my age, experience, and natural mother-wit, had the ghost of an idea of what Rosanna Spearman’s unaccountable behaviour really meant.  She was out of our thoughts, poor soul, before we had seen the last flutter of her little grey cloak among the sand-hills.  And what of that? you will ask, naturally enough.  Read on, good friend, as patiently as you can, and perhaps you will be as sorry for Rosanna Spearman as I was, when I found out the truth.