Page:The New Penelope.djvu/172

 blots me out entirely; for what will old Joe be worth to Madame Rumway, or to Madame Rumway's fine husband?"

Mrs. Smiley sat thoughtful and silent a long time after this declaration of love, that gave all and required so little. She was sorry for it; but since it was so, and she must know it, she was glad that she had heard it that night. She could place it in the balance with that other declaration, and decide upon their relative value to her; for she saw, as he did, that the two were incompatible—one must be given up.

"It is late," she said, rising. "You will come up and take breakfast with Willie and me, before you go home? My strawberries are in their prime."

"I thought you would a-told me to go, an' never come back," he said, stepping out into the moonlight with the elastic tread of twenty-five. He stopped and looked back at her, with a beaming countenance, like a boy's.

She was standing on the step above him, looking down at him with a pleasant but serious expression. "I am going to trust you never to repeat to me what you have said to-night. I know I can trust you."

"So be it, White Rose," he returned, with so rapid and involuntary a change of attitude, voice, and expression, that the pang of his hurt pierced her heart also. "But I know I can trust you," she repeated, as if she had not seen that shrinking from the blow. "And I am going to try to make your life a little pleasanter, and more like other people's. When you are dressed up, and ordered to behave properly, and made to look as handsome as you can, so that ladies shall take notice of you and flatter you with their eyes and tongues, and you come to have the same interest in the world that other men have—and why shouldn't you?—then your imagination will not be running away with you, or making angels out of common little persons like myself—how dreadfully prosy and commonplace you have no idea! And I forbid you to allow Willie to stick your hat full of flowers, when you go fishing together; and order