Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/119

Rh you waiting to-morrow. Good afternoon!" and she ran up the pathway like a fleet deer.

"Did n't touch his hat. Don't even know enough to touch his hat. What boors these country people are!" grumbled Aunt Jane, as she laboriously toiled up the piazza steps, lifting her fat ankles slowly, and swinging alternately to right and left, as a duck does when it waddles up-hill.

"Well, why should he touch his hat, Aunt Jane?" exclaimed Fanny aggressively. "He is n't a coachman, and he has never been taught that gentlemen ought to lift their hats to ladies,—nobody does in Deerway. If he had been born in the city he would have known better. It is n't his fault."

Aunt Jane was half way up-stairs, and wheezing audibly, but she stopped, whirled with difficulty on the narrow stair, and exclaimed:— "It 's my opinion, Fanny Lane, that you 've got some notion in your head of flirting with that strapping fellow, and I 'm just going to put your mother on her guard." Fanny flushed. "Oh, how could mamma ever have had such a coarse sister?" she thought, but she answered merrily.

"I 'm not afraid. Mamma knows much better than to believe anything you tell her about me."

And then Fanny Lane sat herself down in a corner of the piazza, and looked off into the vast