y, with
mollified irritability: "You will come to Italy to-morrow?--Ze day
after?--not at all?" The last was given with a roar, for lack of her
immediate response. Emilia would find a tear on her eyelids at
times. Surround herself as she might with her illusions, she had no
resting-place in Wilfrid's heart, and knew it. She knew it as the young
know that they are to die on a future day, without feeling the sadness
of it, but with a dimly prevalent idea that this life is therefore
incomplete. And again her blood, as with a wave of rich emotion, washed
out the blank spot. She thought: "What can he want but my love?" And
thus she satisfied her own hungry questioning by seeming to supply an
answer to his.

The ladies of Brookfield by no means encouraged Emilia to refuse the
generous offer of Mr. Pericles. They thought, too, that she might--might
she? Oh! certainly she might go to Italy under his protection. "Would
you let one of your blood?" asked Wilfrid brutally. With some cunning he
led them to admit that Emilia's parents should rightly be consulted in
such a case.

One day Mr. Pericles said to the ladies: "I shall give a fete: a party
monstre. In ze air: on grass. I beg you to invite friends of yours."

Before the excogitation of this splendid resolve, he had been observed
to wear for some period a conspiratorial aspect. When it was
delivered, and Arabella had undertaken the management of the "party
monstre"--(which was to be on Besworth Lawn, and, as it was not
their own party, could be conducted with a sort of quasi-contemptuous
superiority to incongruous gatherings)--this being settled, the forehead
of Mr. Pericles cleared and he ceased to persecute Emilia.

"I am not one that is wopped," he said significantly; nodding to his
English hearers, as if this piece of shrewd acquaintance with the
expressive mysteries of their language placed them upon equal terms.

It was really 'a providential thing' (as devout people phrase it) that
Laura Tinley and Mabel Copley should call shortly after this, and invite
the ladies to a proposed picnic of theirs on Besworth Lawn. On Besworth
Lawn, of all places! and they used the word 'picnic.'

"A word suggestive of gnawed drumstick and ginger-beer bottles." Adela
quoted some scapegoat of her acquaintance, as her way was when she
wished to be pungent without incurring the cold sisterly eye of reproof
for a vulgarism.

Both Laura and Mabel, when they heard of the mighty entertain