hat she had pursued, for she was indeed rather unnecessarily
ashamed of it. "It was just like a worldly mamma asking a young man his
intentions about her daughter," she said to herself, with a whimsical
smile. "Probably nothing will come of it but a cessation of these silly
little attentions to Nora." But she felt a little shy and constrained
when she entered the drawing-room, and, while shaking hands with her
cousin, she did not lift her eyes to his face.

When she had taken a seat, however, and managed to steal a glance at
him, she was half-provoked, half-reassured. Cuthbert's mobile face was
full of a merry, twinkling humor, and expressed no penitence at all. She
was so much astonished that she forgot her shyness, and looked at him
inquiringly without opening her lips.

Cuthbert laughed--an irrepressible little laugh, as if he could not help
it. "Look here, Cousin Janetta," he said, "I'm awfully sorry, but I
really can't help it. The idea of you as a duenna and of Wyvis as a
heavy father has been tickling me ever since yesterday, and I shall have
to have it out sooner or later. I assure you it's only a nervous
affection. If I didn't laugh, I _might_ cry or faint, and that would be
worse, you know."

"I don't quite see the joke," said Janetta, gravely.

"The joke," said Cuthbert, "lies in the contrast between yourself and
the role you have taken upon you."

"It is a role that I am obliged to take upon me," interposed Janetta;
"because my sisters have no father, and a mother whose health makes it
impossible for her to guard them as she would like to do."

"Now you're going to be severe," said Cuthbert; "and indeed I am
guiltless of anything but a little harmless fooling. I can but tender my
humblest apologies, and assure you that I have resigned my post in Mrs.
Smith's educational establishment, and that I will keep my flowers in
future to myself, unless I may send them with your consent and that of
my authoritative elder brother."

Janetta was not mollified. "It is easy for you to talk of it so
lightly," she said, "but you forget that you might have involved both my
sisters in serious trouble."

"Don't you think I should have been able to get them out again?" said
Cuthbert, with all the lightness to which she objected. "Don't you think
that I could have pacified the schoolmistress? There is one thing that I
must explain. My fancy for teaching was a fad, undertaken for its own
sake, which led me accidentally a