Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/52

44 mind begets acting; and seeing that the gentle gale my soul craves refuses to blow, I conceive the daring thought of myself acting the part of gentle zephyr. I look around; no one is to be seen. Dorley is invisible; the governor I saw fast asleep in the library a while ago the coast is clear. In the twinkling of an eye I have swung myself up into the tree, and am shaking with a will. The fruit is falling in a bounteous red shower, when a voice directly below me makes me start so violently, that I drop the bough and lose my footing. But, alas! instead of respectably smiting mother earth with my nose, I remain suspended, petticoats above, legs below. Even in this awful moment, the verse over the barber's shop comes into my mind—

Only in this case, if I had been clad in Jack's clothes, not my own, I should not be undone. My face has disappeared into the crown of my sun bonnet in my abrupt descent, so I cannot see my discoverer. Can it be—can it be the governor? No, for if it had I should have received palpable evidence of his wrath before this.

"I wish your pa could see you," says Dorley's deliberate voice, sounding more sweetly in my ears than ever did song of nightingale; ow he would whack you?"

"I know he would," I murmur indistinctly from the depths of my bonnet. "Do, there's a good, kind Dorley, take me down!"

But Dorley has suffered many things at my hands, and now his day has come, he means to enjoy it for a little while.

"You've been a bad young lady to me, Miss Ullen," he says slowly (and at the sound of his leisurely voice I aim a sudden kick at him with my dangling legs, for oh! at any moment he may appear on the scene and then). "You and your beasts has