The very force of Rachel’s resolution not to be put out of countenance served to cover her with the most uncomfortable blushes, all the more at the thought of her own unlucky exclamation.  “I came here,” said Alick, coolly, “to assist in recovering the beloved remains from a watery grave;” and then, as Bessie insisted on hearing the Avoncester version, he gave it; while Grace added the intelligence that the hero was a clergyman, sinking the opinions, as too vague to be mentioned, even had not the company been too flighty for a subject she thought serious and painful.  “And he is at this moment sketching the Spinster’s Needles!” said Bessie.  “Well, I am consoled.  With all your resolve to flatten down an adventure, fate is too strong for you.  Something will come of it.  Is not the very resolve that it shall not be an adventure a token?”

“If any one should wish to forget it, it is you, I think, Bessie,” said Alick.  “Your admirable sagacity seems to have been at fault.  I thought you prided yourself on your climbing.”

“Up a slippery perpendicular—­”

“I know the place,” he gravely answered.

“Well,” exclaimed Bessie, recovering herself, “I am not a mermaid nor even a dear gazelle, and, in my humble opinion, there was far more grace in preventing heroism from being ’unwept, unnoticed, and unsung,’ than in perilling my own neck, craning down and strangling the miserable beast, by pulling him up by the scrough of his neck!  What an introduction would have been lost!”

“If you are going to play, Bessie,” said her brother, “it would be kind to take pity upon those boys.”

“One achievement is mine,” she said, dancing away backwards, her bright eyes beaming with saucy merriment, “the great Alexander has bidden me to croquet.”

“I am afraid,” said her brother, turning to Rachel as she departed, “that it was all her fault.  Pray be patient with her, she has had many disadvantages.”

His incomprehensible irony had so often perplexed Rachel, that she did not know whether his serious apologetic tone were making game of her annoyance, and she answered not very graciously, “Oh, never mind, it did not signify.”  And at the same time came another urgent entreaty from the boys that the two “aunts” would join the game, Conrade evidently considering that partnership with him would seal the forgiveness Aunt Rachel had won by the rescue of Don.

Grace readily yielded, but Rachel pleaded her engagement, and when the incorrigible Bessie declared that they perfectly understood that nothing could compete with the sketch of the Spinster’s Needles, she answered, “I promised to write a letter for my mother on business before post time.  The Burnaby bargain,” she explained, to add further conviction.

“A business-like transaction indeed!” exclaimed Bessie, much diverted with the name.

“Only a bit of land in trust for apprenticing poor children,” said Rachel.  “It was left by a Curtis many generations ago, in trust to the rector of the parish and the lord of the manor; and poor Mr. Linton is so entirely effete, that it is virtually in our hands.  It is one of the vexations of my life that more good cannot be done with it, for the fees are too small for superior tradespeople, and we can only bind them to the misery of lacemaking.  The system belongs to a worn-out state of things.”