ore the
catastrophe--"you will not mind if I do not see much of you--do not go
out walking--do not talk to you very much till--till _it_ is over!"

"And why am I not to mind?" he asks, half jestingly, and yet a little
gravely, too.

"You will have quite enough--_too much_ of me afterward," I say, with a
shy laugh, "and _they_--they will never have much of me again--never so
much, at least--and" (with rather a tremble in my voice) "we have had
_such_ fun together!"

And so Sir Roger keeps away. Whether his self-denial costs him much, I
cannot say. It never occurs to me at the time that it does. He may think
me a very nice little girl, and that I shall be a great comfort to him,
but he cannot care much about having any very long conversations with
me--he that has seen so many lands, and known so many great and clever
people, and read so many books. He has always been _most_
undemonstrative to me. At _his_ age, no doubt, he does not care much for
the foolish endearments of lovers; so, with an easy conscience, I devote
myself, for my short space, to the boys, to Barbara, to Vick, and the
jackdaw. Once, indeed--just once--I have a little talk with him, and
afterward I almost wish that I had not had it. We are sitting under a
horse-chestnut-tree in the garden--a tree that, under the handling of
the warm air, is breaking into a thousand tender faces. We did not begin
by being _tete-a-tete_; indeed, several lately-occupied chairs intervene
between us, but first one and then another has slipped away, and we are
alone.

"Nancy!" says Sir Roger, his eyes following the Brat, who is lightly
tripping up the stone steps, looking very small and agile in his
white-flannel cricketing things, "what is that boy's real name? Why do
you call him 'the Brat'?"

"Because he _is_ such a _Brat_," reply I, fondly, picking up from the
grass a green chestnut-bud that the squirrels or the rooks have untimely
nipped. "Did you ever see any thing so little, so white and pert? He has
sadly mistaken his vocation in life: he ought to have been a street
Arab."

"One gets rather sick of one's surname," says my companion. "Except your
father, hardly any one calls me Roger now! I should be glad to answer to
it again."

He turns and looks at me with a kind of appeal as he says this. If he
were not forty-seven and a man, I should say that he was coloring a
little. After all, blushing is confined to no age. I have seen a veteran
of sixty-five redden vio