t your balls on one hand,"--holding up five wet open
fingers,--"you would think just as I do, and long for change."

"I never knew you had been to London."

"Yes: when I was sixteen I spent a whole year there, with a cousin of
my father's, who went to Canada with her husband's regiment afterward.
But I didn't go out much, she thought me too young, though I was quite
as tall as I am now. She heard me sing once, and insisted on carrying
me up with her to get me lessons from Marigny. He took great pains with
me: that is why I sing so well," says Molly, modestly.

"I confess I often wondered where your exquisite voice received its
cultivation, its finish. Now I know. You were fortunate in securing
Marigny. I have known him refuse dozens through want of time; or so he
said. More probably he would not trouble himself to teach where there
was no certainty of success. Well, and so you dislike the country?"

"No, no. Not so much that. What I dislike is having no one to speak to.
When John is away and Letty on the tread-mill--that is, in the
nursery--I am rather thrown on my own resources; and they are not much.
Your coming was the greatest blessing that ever befell me. When I
actually beheld you in your own proper person on the garden path that
night, I could have hugged you in the exuberance of my joy."

"Then why on earth didn't you?" says Luttrell, reproachfully, as though
he had been done out of something.

"A lingering sense of maiden modesty and a faint idea that perhaps you
might not like it alone restrained me. But for that I must have given
way to my feelings. Just think, if I had," says Molly, breaking into a
merry laugh, "what a horrible fright I would have given you!"

"Not a horrible one, at all events. Molly," bending to examine some
imaginary thing in the side of the boat, "have you never--had
a--lover?"

"A lover? Oh, yes, I have had any amount of them," says Molly, with an
alacrity that makes his heart sink. "I don't believe I could count my
adorers: it quite puzzles me to know where to begin. There were the
curates,--our rector is not sweet-tempered, so we have a fresh one
every year,--and they never fail me. Three months after they come, as
regular as clock-work, they ask me to be their wife. Now, I appeal to
you,"--clasping her hands and wrinkling up all her pretty
forehead,--"_do_ I look like a curate's wife?"

"You do not," replies Luttrell, emphatically, regarding with interest
the _debonnaire, s