cket-book had grown, and had budded,
and had bloomed, and was now rotting, like other roses. I suppose you
will want me to say that the young fool kissed it next? Of course he
kissed it. What were lips made for, pray, but for smiling and simpering,
and (possibly) humbugging, and kissing, and opening to receive
mutton-chops, cigars, and so forth? I cannot write this part of the
story of our Virginians, because Harry did not dare to write it himself
to anybody at home, because, if he wrote any letters to Maria (which,
of course, he did, as they were in the same house, and might meet each
other as much as they liked), they were destroyed; because he afterwards
chose to be very silent about the story, and we can't have it from her
ladyship, who never told the truth about anything. But cui bono? I say
again. What is the good of telling the story? My gentle reader, take
your story: take mine. To-morrow it shall be Miss Fanny's, who is just
walking away with her doll to the schoolroom and the governess (poor
victim! she has a version of it in her desk): and next day it shall be
Baby's, who is bawling out on the stairs for his bottle.

Maria might like to have and exercise power over the young Virginian;
but she did not want that Harry should quarrel with his aunt for her
sake, or that Madame de Bernstein should be angry with her. Harry was
not the Lord of Virginia yet: he was only the Prince, and the Queen
might marry and have other Princes, and the laws of primogeniture might
not be established in Virginia, qu'en savait elle? My lord her brother
and she had exchanged no words at all about the delicate business. But
they understood each other, and the Earl had a way of understanding
things without speaking. He knew his Maria perfectly well: in the course
of a life of which not a little had been spent in her brother's company
and under his roof, Maria's disposition, ways, tricks, faults, had come
to be perfectly understood by the head of the family; and she would find
her little schemes checked or aided by him, as to his lordship seemed
good, and without need of any words between them. Thus three days
before, when she happened to be going to see that poor dear old Goody,
who was ill with the sore knee in the village (and when Harry Warrington
happened to be walking behind the elms on the green too), my lord with
his dogs about him, and his gardener walking after him, crossed the
court, just as Lady Maria was tripping to the gate