Page:A Literary Courtship (1893).pdf/143

 John flung his scruples to the winds, snatched the paper, and read the following blood-curdling fragment—"not but admire his beautiful self-confidence, though it"

"Now don't you wish you hadn't burned it up?" I cried, much tickled.

"Pooh!" said he, with pretended indifference. "Nobody knows whom she was writing about"; and without reading what was written on the other side of the strip, he tore the paper up into microscopic fractions.

"Perhaps it was Benny Mortimer," I suggested.

Benny was a meek little man, who blushed when he was spoken to.

"There are worse things than self-confidence," John declared, as he held the door-handle, "I wish I had a little more myself." And with this rash and startling assertion, he went off down the corridor, to his own roost.

John has his faults like the rest of us, but I had never suspected him of