“Dear Harry!  I saw him again quite lately.  He came to see me at Bayeux,” said Bessie with a happy sigh.

“Did he? we never heard of that.  He is at home now:  perhaps he will come over with them to-morrow, eh?”

“I wish he would,” was Bessie’s frank rejoinder.

“And who else is there that you used to like?  Fanny Mitten has married a clerk in the Hampton Bank, and Miss Ely is married; but she was married in London.  I was in great hopes once that old Phipps would take Miss Thusy O’Flynn, and a sweet pair they would have been; but he thought better of it, and she went away as she came.  Her aunt was a good old soul, and what did it matter if she was vulgar?  We were very sorry to lose her contralto in the choir.”  Miss Buff’s gossip was almost run out.  Bessie remembered little Christie to inquire for him.  “Little Christie—­who is he?  I never heard of him.  Oh, the wheelwright’s son who went away to be an artist!  I don’t know.  The old man made me a garden-barrow once, and charged me enormously; and when I told him it was too dear, he said it would last me my life.  Such impertinence!  The common people grow very independent.”

Bessie had heard the anecdote of the garden-barrow before.  It spoke volumes for the peace and simplicity of Miss Buff’s life that she still recollected and cited this ancient grievance.  A few more words of the doctor and his household, a few doubts and fears on Bessie’s part that her telegram might be delayed, and a few cheery predictions on Miss Buff’s, and they said good-bye, with the expression of a cordial hope that they might meet soon again, and meet in the Forest.  Bessie Fairfax was amused and exhilarated by this familiar tattle about her beloved Beechhurst.  It had dissipated the shadows of her three years’ absence, and made home present to her once more.  Nothing seems trivial that concerns places and people dear to young affections, and all the keener became her desire to be amongst them.  She consulted Smith’s boy as to the probable time of the arrival of her telegram at the doctor’s house; she studied the table of the steamboats.  She regretted bitterly that she had not written the first day at Ryde; then pleaded her own excuse because letters were a rarity for her to write, and had hitherto required a formal permission.

Mrs. Betts lingered with her long and patiently upon the pier, but the Gardiners did not come down again, and by and by Mrs. Betts, feeling the approach of dinner-time, began to look out towards the yacht.  After a minute’s steady observation she said, half to herself, but seriously, “I do believe they are making ready to sail.  There is a boat alongside with bread and things.”

“To sail!  To leave Ryde!  Oh, don’t you think my uncle would wait a day if I begged him?” cried Bessie in acute dismay.

“No, miss—­not if he has given orders and the wind keeps fair.  If I was in your place, miss, I should not ask him.  And as for the telegram, I should not name it.  It would put Mr. Frederick out, and do no good.”