Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/429

Rh and just as he had despaired of ever seeing her eyes open again, she opened them.

"Walter!" she gasped, and then covered her face with her hands to hide her blushes.

He helped her to a sitting posture, and then insisted upon her taking more brandy. Almost mechanically she obeyed him.

She felt strangely confused and bewildered. Beyond a slight shaking-up, her fall had done her no harm; but the presence of Walter embarrassed her as she had never been embarrassed before. She had called him by his first name, too, and that also troubled her.

He made no attempt to force her into conversation, and, after a remark or two concerning her accident, he relapsed into a respectful silence.

"If you can walk, I think we had best go home," he said, after an hour.

She arose, and they walked away together without exchanging a word. When Mary reached home, Dubb was gone.

There was one characteristic about Millicent Morris which, while it might not have been original, was certainly not directly chargeable to Aunt Jenkins's seminary. She lived, inwardly, in a perpetual atmosphere of romance. Fairy-tales had been her first style of literature, and she had abandoned these for the still more extravagant variety of wonder-tales which are commonly classified and specified as society novels. Reading them was, truly enough, one of the deadly things which Aunt Jenkins vociferously prohibited. But Aunt Jenkins had not, of course, been present during all the hours in the years in which Millicent's mind had been supposed to be developing; and whenever the periods of her absence had been so long as an hour, Millicent had devoted the hour to the devouring of some yellow-covered book with rose-colored contents.

As a consequence, she was always looking out for some prince, or count, or senator, or millionaire, who was provokingly slow in coming. That he eventually would come, she had no doubt; it was always so in the books she had read. To be exact, there was just one book which she had read, in which the fair and languishing maiden had, of her own free will and consent, been married to a plebeian, and had lived happily with him ever afterwards, just as such things frequently occur in life. But Millicent was hurt and shocked. The book cost her several sleepless nights, and no end of tears. More than that, she committed the author's name to memory, so that she might never read any more of his painful realism, and he was the only author whose name she ever did remember. But in all the rest of the delightful books she read, the languishing fair, after a suitable amount of languishing, was married to some man as charming, in his way, as his lair bride was in hers.

That Millicent herself would one day be such a fair bride, she had no doubt. She had often studied herself,—in the mirror, of course,—