"That is my own look-out," replied the governess. "When a gentleman makes a promise to me, I expect him to keep it. I go up to the school-room, and I wait, I wait, I wait! Ah, my poor patience, how I wait! I have that copy of Tasso, that you said you would like to see. Will you come?" Herbert thought he was in for it. He glanced at the setting sun--at least, at the spot where the sun had gone down, for it had sunk below the horizon, leaving only crimson streaks in the grey sky to tell of what had been. Twilight was rapidly coming on, when he would depart to pay his usual evening visit: there was no time, he decided, for Tasso and the governess. "I'll come another evening," said he. "I have an engagement, and I must go out to keep it." A stony hardness settled on mademoiselle's face. "What engagement?" she imperatively demanded. It might be thought that Herbert would have been justified in civilly declining to satisfy her curiosity. What was it to her? Apparently he thought otherwise. Possibly he was afraid of an outbreak. "What engagement! Oh--I am going to play a pool at billiards with Lord Hawkesley. He is in Helstonleigh again." "And that is what you go for, every evening--to play billiards with Lord Hawkesley?" she resumed, her eyes glistening ominously. "Of course it is, mademoiselle. With Hawkesley or other fellows." "A lie!" curtly responded mademoiselle. "I say," cried Herbert, laughing good-humouredly: "do you call that orthodox language?" "It nothing to you what I call it," she cried, clipping her words in her vehemence, as she would do when excited. "It not with Milord Hawkesley, not to billiards that you go! I know it is not." "Then I tell you that I often play billiards," cried Herbert. "On my honour I do." "May-be, may-be," answered she, very rapidly. "But it not to billiards that you go every evening. Every evening!--every evening! Not an evening now, but you go out, you go out! I bought Tasso--do you know that I _bought_ Tasso?--that I have bought it with my money, that you may have the pleasure of hearing me read it, as you said--as you call it? Should I spend the money, had I thought you would not come when I had it--would not care to hear it read?" Had she been in a more amiable mood, Herbert would have told her that she was a simpleton for spending her money; he would have told her that Tasso, read in the original, would have been to him unintelligible as Sanscrit. He had a faint remembrance of saying to mademoiselle that he should like to read Tasso, in answer to a remark that Tasso was her favourite of the Italian poets: but he had only made the observation carelessly, without seriously meaning anything. And she had been so foolish as to go and buy it! "Will you come this evening and hear it begun?" she continued, breaking the pause, and speaking rather more graciously.