Carry went into hysterics, entreating everybody to "hold me down! hold me down!" Laura fell fainting in the arms of the Reverend Pringle, who looked hopelessly bewildered. Miss Blandish, making an ineffectual and similar attempt to repose on the white waistcoat and nankeen trowsers of Captain Curry Cucumber, was precipitated by a dexterous and skilful manoeuvre on the part of that gallant officer, into the salad-bowl, the Captain muttering horrible imprecations in Hindostanee, such as heaping curses on the beard of her departed father, and devoutly hoping that jackasses might sit on her grandmother's grave. Doctor Jolly alone retained his composure, and darted off, as quickly as his size and gout would permit him, in the direction from which the young imp, Mortimer, had come. What had happened? Lizzie, after enduring the platitudes of Lieutenant Harrowby until she was sick of them--the burden of that officer's conversation being limited apparently to the observations of "Haw! be-y Je-ove!" and "Doo-ced fine!" to anything and everything around him, including scenery and lobster salad, managed at last to get away from the company. She wandered along listlessly amongst the thickly crowded elms and firs of the forest that crowned the slopes of the dell, musing on her own sad thoughts, for her heart felt very weary. Everything had gone wrong with her that day; Tom had not spoken two words to her, and she did not know whether he wanted to speak to her at all. He was very unkind; he might, at least, have said something after what had passed between them the other day! Then, too, the whole thing had bored her, and she wished she had never come! Lady Inskip also had been very snappish with her--even rude, she thought, and though Lizzie, with all her gentleness, was not "one to be put upon with impunity," and could have held her own against the campaigner at any other time: still to-day she had quite lost her natural spirit, and did not try to turn aside a single shaft of the many hurled by her implacable foe. Lizzie was sadly out of heart. Rambling along, she at length came to a little open glade at some distance from where the picnickers were making merry. Here, as she turned round the trunk of a gnarled old elm, all covered with ivy, which had previously obscured this open glade from her view, whom should she see, standing there in gloomy solitude, and looking up at the fleecy white clouds sailing over head, but the very person who filled her thoughts--Tom Hartshorne himself, and no other. Now was the time, one would think, for an explanation between the pair; but the Fates willed it otherwise. "That young imp," when he left the picnickers, sallied off like a gallant young sportsman, as he fancied himself, with his "gun upon his shoulder," and a brandy flask, which he used for a shot pouch, instead of a "bayonet by his side," in the words of the affecting ballad of "Jeanette and Jeanot."