Page:Greatest Short Stories (1915).djvu/266

Rh “Very well, very well, Master Daniel!” exclaimed Billy, in a voice trembling with grief and indignation, “there’s good enough reason why you won't speak a word for me. You want her yourself—here it is in your own writing. No wonder you won’t tell Lottie to be my wife, when you’re trying to take her away from me. Oh, Lottie, dear Lottie! I love you just as much as he does, though I don’t know everything and can’t write you poetry like it was out of the Fifth Reader! Daniel, how could you go and write to my Lottie this way: ‘My churner’—no, it isn’t churner, it’s charmer,—‘let me call thee mine’?”

Forgetting the sacredness of private MS. in that of private grief, he would have gone on, with a pause here and there for certainty of spelling, to the conclusion of the poem, had not Lottie sprung up, with her imploring face suffused by her discovery, for the first time, of the identity of her secret lover and the escape of his sonnet from her pocket. It was too late I There he stood before her unmistakably proved, and herself unmistakably proving in what estimation she held his verses and bouquets.

“Oh Billy, dear Billy! If you do love me, don’t do so!” So exclaiming, she held out her hand, and Billy put the MS. into it with all the dignity of a wounded spirit.

“Mr. Lovegrove,” said Miss Pilgrim, “I don’t know what to say.” 263