‘Oh!’ she cried, clapping her hands, ’there goes a dear old English gull!  How I have wished to see him!  I haven’t seen one for two years and seven months.  When I ’m at home, I ’ll leave my window open all night, just to hear the rooks, when they wake in the morning.  There goes another!’

She tossed up her nose again, exclaiming: 

’I ’m sure I smell England nearer and nearer!  I smell the fields, and the cows in them.  I’d have given anything to be a dairy-maid for half an hour!  I used to lie and pant in that stifling air among those stupid people, and wonder why anybody ever left England.  Aren’t you glad to come back?’

This time the fair speaker lent her eyes to the question, and shut her lips; sweet, cold, chaste lips she had:  a mouth that had not yet dreamed of kisses, and most honest eyes.

The young man felt that they were not to be satisfied by his own, and after seeking to fill them with a doleful look, which was immediately succeeded by one of superhuman indifference, he answered: 

‘Yes!  We shall soon have to part!’ and commenced tapping with his foot the cheerful martyr’s march.

Speech that has to be hauled from the depths usually betrays the effort.  Listening an instant to catch the import of this cavernous gasp upon the brink of sound, the girl said: 

‘Part? what do you mean?’

Apparently it required a yet vaster effort to pronounce an explanation.  The doleful look, the superhuman indifference, were repeated in due order:  sound, a little more distinct, uttered the words: 

‘We cannot be as we have been, in England!’ and then the cheerful martyr took a few steps farther.

’Why, you don’t mean to say you’re going to give me up, and not be friends with me, because we’ve come back to England?’ cried the girl in a rapid breath, eyeing him seriously.

Most conscientiously he did not mean it! but he replied with the quietest negative.

‘No?’ she mimicked him.  ’Why do you say “No” like that?  Why are you so mysterious, Evan?  Won’t you promise me to come and stop with us for weeks?  Haven’t you said we would ride, and hunt, and fish together, and read books, and do all sorts of things?’

He replied with the quietest affirmative.

‘Yes?  What does “Yes!” mean?’ She lifted her chest to shake out the dead-alive monosyllable, as he had done.  ’Why are you so singular this morning, Evan?  Have I offended you?  You are so touchy!’

The slur on his reputation for sensitiveness induced the young man to attempt being more explicit.

‘I mean,’ he said, hesitating; ’why, we must part.  We shall not see each other every day.  Nothing more than that.’  And away went the cheerful martyr in sublimest mood.

‘Oh! and that makes you, sorry?’ A shade of archness was in her voice.

The girl waited as if to collect something in her mind, and was now a patronizing woman.