"Al!" cried Margaret, seizing both his hands; "O Al, you don't--you do--_you_ believe me, don't you, Al? _don't_ you?" "Of course I do." [Illustration] POOR MR. PONSONBY On a bright, windy morning in March, Miss Emmeline Freeman threw open the gate of her mother's little front garden on Walnut Street, Brookline, slammed it behind her with one turn of her wrist, marched with an emphatic tapping of boot-heels up the path between the crocus-beds to the front door, threw that open, and rushed into the drawing-room, where she paused for breath, and began before she found it: "O mamma! O Aunt Sophia! O Bessie! What do you think? Lily Carey--you would never guess--Lily Carey--I was never so surprised in my life--Lily Carey is engaged!" Mrs. Freeman laid down her pen by the side of her column of figures, losing her account for the seventh time; Miss Sophia Morgan paused in the silk stocking she was knitting, just as she was beginning to narrow; and Bessie Freeman dropped her brush full of colour on to the panel she was finishing, while all three exclaimed with one voice, "To whom?" "That is the queer part of it. You will never guess. Indeed, how should you?" "To whom?" repeated the chorus, with a unanimity and precision that would have been creditable to the stage, and with the due accent of impatience on the important word. "To no one you ever would have dreamed of; indeed, you never heard of him--a Mr. Reginald Ponsonby. It is a most romantic thing. He is an Englishman, very good family and handsome and all that, but not much money. That is why it has been kept quiet so long." "So long? How long?" chimed in the trio, still in unison. "Why, for three years and more. Lily met him in New York that time she was there in the summer, you know, when her father was ill at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. But Mr. Carey would never let it be called an engagement till now." "Did Lily tell you all this?" asked Bessie. "No, Ada Thorne was telling everyone about it at the lunch party. She heard it from Lily." "I think Lily might have told us herself." "She said she did not mean to write to anyone, it has been going on so long, and her prospects were so uncertain; she did not care to have any formal announcement, but just to have her friends hear of it gradually. But she sent you and me very kind messages, Bessie, and she wants you to take the O'Flanigans--that's her district family, you know--and me to take her Sunday-school class. She says she really must have her Sundays now to write to Mr. Ponsonby, poor fellow! She has been obliged to scribble to him at any odd moment she could, and he is so far off." "Where is he--in England?"