"About Flossy?" she interrupted hastily, warned by the look in his eyes. "No; about yourself. I"-- "But I want to tell you about Flossy first. You know she"-- "I don't want to talk of Flossy," Burleigh said. Alas! that he would not be warned or hindered. His excitement swept away every trace of his diffidence, and he had never looked so manly as now. His somewhat florid face was pale, and his great eyes looked straight upon her as if his very soul were in them. "I love you," he said concisely enough. "I want you to marry me." "O Burleigh! Oh, don't! Oh, please!" Patty cried, drawing away the hand which he had seized to the neglect of the reins. "I didn't think you could say such things, when we've always been such good friends." "Is that any reason we should not be better friends?" he demanded. "But not that way; not"-- Fate came to her assistance, and spared her the necessity of completing the sentence. The horse had been following his own impulses in lack of any direction from his driver; and bringing the wheel too near the edge of the ditch, the carriage lightly careened, depositing its inmates unhurt but badly shaken in the midst of a sand-heap. The horse was fortunately well trained; and Burleigh had no difficulty in stopping him, which he did with a very angry face. As for Patty, she sat up in the sand, and burst into perfect shouts of laughter. She laughed and laughed, and held her sides and laughed again until the tears streamed from her eyes. "O Burleigh!" she cried between her bursts of merriment. "Oh, I can't help it! Oh, it's too funny! I shall die, I believe!" And off she went into fresh peals of laughter, until her companion felt a strong desire to shake her. "To think you should tip me over, on top of making love to me! O Burleigh! it is too awfully droll for any thing! It is the funniest thing I ever heard of. Oh, dear!" "I don't see where the fun comes in," he returned, rather crossly. "You always laugh at me." "Oh, I don't either, but now I can't help it! Don't look so solemn, or you'll kill me!" Her escort was hurt and angry. He felt that she flouted him and his love, and in this he did her injustice. Chagrin at his rejection, and mortification at the accident, combined to render him morbidly sensitive. Besides, he could not know that this lovely girl before him with flushed cheeks and tumbled hair was laughing as much from nervousness as from fun, and that the words of Tom Putnam on the previous night were as much a motive power in this extravagant cachinnation as his own proposal. "I will help you into the buggy," he said stiffly. "Don't be cross," she said, rising with the aid of the hand he extended. "I am sorry I vexed you. I was horrid to laugh so. We are good friends again, and for always, are we not?"