‘And now you think you are flattering me!’ I said.

She looked nervous.

‘And now you’re asking yourself what you can do better than I can!’

She said, ‘Go on.’

I stopped.

She charged me with being pulled up short.

I denied it.

‘Guess, guess!’ said she.  ‘You can’t.’

My reply petrified her.  ’You were thinking that you are a lady by birth on both sides.’

At first she refused to admit it.  ’No, it wasn’t that, Harry, it wasn’t really.  I was thinking how clever you are.’

‘Yes, after, not before.’

’No, Harry, but you are clever.  I wish I was half as clever.  Fancy reading people’s ideas!  I can read my pony’s, but that’s different; I know by his ears.  And as for my being a lady, of course I am, and so are you—­I mean, a gentleman.  I was thinking—­now this is really what I was thinking—­I wished your father lived near, that we might all be friends.  I can’t bear the squire when he talks . . . .  And you quite as good as me, and better.  Don’t shake me off, Harry.’

I shook her in the gentlest manner, not suspecting that she had read my feelings fully as well as I her thoughts.  Janet and I fell to talking of my father incessantly, and were constantly together.  The squire caught one of my smiles rising, when he applauded himself lustily for the original idea of matching us; but the idea was no longer distasteful to me.  It appeared to me that if I must some day be married, a wife who would enjoy my narratives, and travel over the four quarters of the globe, as Janet promised to do, in search of him I loved, would be the preferable person.  I swore her to secresy; she was not to tell her brother Charley the subject we conversed on.

‘Oh dear, no!’ said she, and told him straightway.

Charley, home for his winter holidays, blurted out at the squire’s table:  ’So, Harry Richmond, you’re the cleverest fellow in the world, are you?  There’s Janet telling everybody your father’s the cleverest next to you, and she’s never seen him!’

’How? hulloa, what ‘s that?’ sang out the squire.

‘Charley was speaking of my father, sir,’ I said, preparing for thunder.

We all rose.  The squire looked as though an apoplectic seizure were coming on.

‘Don’t sit at my table again,’ he said, after a terrible struggle to be articulate.

His hand was stretched at me.  I swung round to depart.  ’No, no, not you; that fellow,’ he called, getting his arm level toward Charley.

I tried to intercede—­the last who should have done it.

‘You like to hear him, eh?’ said the squire.

I was ready to say that I did, but my aunt, whose courage was up when occasion summoned it, hushed the scene by passing the decanter to the squire, and speaking to him in a low voice.

‘Biter’s bit.  I’ve dished myself, that’s clear,’ said Charley; and he spoke the truth, and such was his frankness that I forgave him.