“He talk only of the folly of flattery, monsieur,” said the little lady, simpering and bashful. “A ruse,” cried the other, “that he learned when he played the monk. Beware of him most when he preaches.” “Mademoiselle is told to beware of you, monsieur,” said Pamela to a gravely ecstatic young gentleman who sat next to her. “Of me?” “Are you not then the monk, the airmeet; and is it not mademoiselle’s ear you seek?” “No,” said Ned brusquely. He looked at the pretty insolent face, at the toss of brown curls, the little straight saucy nose, the lowered lids. He thought he had never seen anything so wonderful and so fair as this human flower. The neck of her frock was cut down to a point. She seemed the very bud of white womanhood breaking from its sheath. Did she gauge the admiration of his soul? He was not a boisterous wooer or a talkative. For days he had purposed lightening the conscious gravity of his suit by “springing” her lost heels upon his inamorata. He could never, however, make up his mind as to the right wisdom of the course. A dozen considerations kept him undecided--as to the possibility of giving offence, of appearing a buffoon, of failing, out of the depths of his infatuation, to introduce into the conduct of the jest a necessary barm of gaiety. Without this, how little might the result justify the venture? It was an anxious dilemma. The thought of it threw into the shade all questions of a merely national character in which he had once taken an interest; and, in the meantime, he continued to carry the ridiculous baubles about in his pocket. Now, is it not one of Love’s ironies to depress a wooer by the very circumstance that should exalt him; to make him so fearful of his own inadequacy as that he seeks to stultify in himself the very qualities that Nature has amiably gifted him withal? Thus Ned, naturally a quite lovable youth when he had no thought of love, was no sooner come under its spell than he was moved to forego that pretty, self-confident deportment, that was his particular charm, for an uncommunicative diffidence that appeared to present him as a hobbledehoy. He lived in the constant dread, indeed, of procuring his own discomfiture by an assumption of assurance. “You know it is not,” he said--daring greatly, as it seemed to him. “_I_ know, monsieur!” The blue eyes were lifted a moment to his. Perhaps they recognised a latency of meaning in the gaze they encountered. Madame de Genlis had once summed up the character of this sweet _protégée_ of hers. “Idle, witty, vivacious,” she called her; a person the least capable of reflection. Idle, without doubt, she was, in the nursery-maid’s acceptance of the term--a child full of caprice and mischief. “Sure, sir,” she added, with a sudden thrilling demureness, “you must know _me_ for a low-born maid?”