Then Lucy’s manner struck her as rather amicable than amorous.  She was calm, kind, self-possessed, and almost voluble.  As for David, he only got in a word here and there.  When he did, there was something so different in his voice from anything he had ever bestowed on her, that she hated him, and longed to stick scissors into him from the rear, unseen.  At last Lucy suddenly recollected, or seemed to recollect, she was busy, and retired hastily—­so hastily that David saw too late his opportunity lost.  But the music of her voice had so charmed him that he did not like to interrupt it even to speak of that which was nearest his heart.  David sighed deeply, standing there alone.

Mrs. Bazalgette clinched her little fists and looked round for the means of vengeance.  David went down on his knees.  La Bazalgette glared through the crack, and wondered what on earth he was at now.  Oh! he was praying.  “He loves her:  he is eccentricity itself; so he is praying for her, and on my doorsteps” (the householder wounded as well as the flirt).  It was lucky she had not “a thunderbolt in her eye”—­Shakespeare, or a celestial messenger of the wrong sort would have descended on the devout mariner.  It was more than Mrs. Bazalgette could bear:  she had now and then, not often, unladylike impulses.  One of them had set her crouching behind the door of an outhouse, and listening through a crack; and now she had another, an irresistible one:  it was, to take that empty flower-pot, fling it as hard as ever she could at the devotee, then shut the door quick, fly out at the other door, and leave her faithless swain in the agony of knowing himself detected and exposed by some unknown and undiscoverable enemy.

For a vengeance extemporized in less than half a second this was very respectable.  Well, she clawed the flower-pot noiselessly, put her other hand on the door, cast a hasty glance at the means of retreat, and—­things took another twist:  she heard the rustle of a coming gown, and drew back again, and out came Lucy, and nearly ran over David, who was not on his knees after all, but down on his nose, prostrate Orientally.  The fact is, Lucy, among her other qualities, good and bad, was a born housewife, and solicitously careful of certain odds and ends called property.  She found she had dropped one of her gloves in the garden, and she came back in a state of disproportionate uneasiness to find it, and nearly ran over David Dodd.

“What are you doing, Mr. Dodd?”

David arose from his Oriental position, and, being a young man whose impulse always was to tell the simple truth, replied, “I was kissing the place where you stood so long.”

He did not feel he had done anything extraordinary, so he gave her this information composedly; but her face was scarlet in an instant; and he, seeing that, began to blush too.  For once Lucy’s tact was baffled; she did not know what on earth to say, and she stood blushing like a girl of fifteen.