“Oh, Bluebell, you blind little bat, it would be as well if you looked upon him ‘as an uncle or something.’”

But the other sat aghast and speechless.  Lily glanced at her sympathetically.

“Well, perhaps he mayn’t care for Cecil.  He has been talking nonsense to you, too, I see, as he has to us all three, for that matter.  I feel so angry about it, I have a great mind to tell you all he said to me.”

“I don’t want to hear,” said her companion, coldly; “nor do I at all agree with you about Cecil”

“All right,” returned the other.  “Only remember he can’t afford to marry, whatever he may have pretended to you—­not but what that subject is about the last it ever occurs to him to enter upon.”

Bluebell at first utterly refused to receive this intolerable suggestion into her mind.  Lilla must be inventing—­in love with him herself, and trying to make mischief.  Nothing should induce her to believe it.  How irritating she was, too, with that knowing, quizzing expression in her face!

So when Cecil, tired of solitude, proposed coming into their boat, Bluebell eagerly took possession of the canoe, and went off on an independent paddle, ostensibly to look for Miss Prosody.

CHAPTER XVI.

DETECTED.

  His passion is not, he declares, the mere fever
    Of a rapturous moment.  It knows no control;
  It will burn in his breast thro’ existence for ever,
    Immutably fixed in the deeps of the soul. 
                                   —­The Wanderer.

“Why did you shoot on so quick, Major?” said Vavasour, in an injured tone, after the dumb scene before referred to.  “We might as well have stayed and discoursed those young women.”

Fane growled something about not choosing to intrude.

“I don’t suppose they would have minded.  That spicy little party, Lily Tremaine, was smoking.  I wonder who finds her in cigars?”

“I hate Canadian girls!” said Fane.  “And when they pretend to be fast they are more unbearable still.”

“Oh, come,” said Jack, warmly, for was not Bluebell of that maligned nationality? “they must have used you badly, Major.  They are far more unaffected and natural than English girls, who always ride to orders; and as for beauty—­”

“You have only got to look at Bluebell Leigh.  Well, slope back to them, Jack.  You shan’t have the boat, because I should never get it again.  But if you like to plough through that long grass to their bivouac, I daresay the mosquitoes will receive you warmly if the young ladies don’t.”

In the meantime, Bluebell, tempted by a shady creek, abandoned her canoe, and, flinging herself down on a bed of wild flowers, remained a prey to the consideration of this new view of Lilla’s, which would account, in the most unwelcome manner, for the inconsistency of Du Meresq’s conduct with his professions.