. "After all, I begin to think I'm not much. Well, let me
see: would it be news to say I met and talked with, and walked with
your 'lassie wi' the lint-white locks'?"

"Georgie? You----. She was with me all the morning."

"So she told me."

"Ah? And how far did you go with her?"

"To the vicarage. As I had been there all the morning, I couldn't well
go in again,--a fact I felt and deplored."

"I am glad you walked back with her," says Miss Peyton; but she
doesn't look glad. "I hope you were nice to her?"

"Extremely nice: ask her if I wasn't. And our conversation was of the
freshest. We both thought it was the warmest spring day we had ever
known, until we remembered last Thursday, and then we agreed _that_
was the warmest spring day we had ever known. And then we thought
spring was preferable to summer. And, then, that Cissy Redmond would
be very pretty if she hadn't a cocked nose. Don't look so amazed, my
dear Clarissa: it was Miss Broughton's expression, not mine, and a
very good one too, I think. We say a cocked hat; therefore why not a
cocked nose? And then we said all education was a bore and a swindle,
and then----. How old is she, Clarissa?"

"You mean Georgie?"

"Yes."

"Neither nineteen nor twenty."

"So much! Then I really think she is the youngest-looking girl I ever
met at that age. She looks more like sweet seventeen."

"You think her pretty?"

"Rather more than that: she reminds me always of 'Maggie Lauder:'

"'Her face is as the summer cloud, whereon
The dawning sun delights to rest his rays.'

And, again, surely Apollo loves to

"Play at hide-and-seek amid her golden hairs.'"

"Dorian, don't--don't make her unhappy," says Clarissa, blushing
hotly.

"I wish I could," says Dorian. He laughs as he speaks, but there
is truth hidden in his jesting tone. Oh, to make her feel
something,--that cold indifferent child!

"No, no. I am in earnest," says Clarissa, a little anxiously. "Don't
pay her too much attention, if you don't mean it."

"Perhaps I do mean it."

"She is very young,"--ignoring his last speech altogether. "She is a
perfect baby in some ways. It isn't kind of you, I think."

"My dear child, what am I doing? If I hand Miss Broughton a chair, or
ask her if she would like another cup of tea, is that 'making her
unhappy'? I really begin to think society is too moral for me. I shall
give it up, and betake myself to Salt Lake City."

"You won't understand me," begins s