Page:Wiggin--Ladies-in-waiting.djvu/233

  only wonder you’ve never lifted it! But you could be happy only with a very learned and prominent man, you are so clever!”

“I’m clever enough to prefer love to learning, if I have to choose, Dolly, my dear.”

“I’m so sorry you did n’t get a letter, Charlotte,” said the girl, snuggling sympathetically to my side on the bench.

This was more than flesh and blood or angel could bear!

I kissed her, and, shaking her off my shoulder vigorously, I said, as I straightened my hat: “As a matter of fact, Miss Valentine, I have had a letter every day since we left New York; a letter delivered before breakfast by the steward. You have had but one, yet you are twenty and I am thirty!”

“Charlotte!”

“Don’t add to your impudence by being too astonished, darling,” I continued. “Come! let’s go and pick bananas and pineapples and tamarinds and shaddocks and star-apples and sapodillas!”