Harry was openly vexed. "Well, either way! would any true man leave _that_ woman behind?" and I tried to put in that that was what I had been leading up to; but it makes me smile yet, to recall how jauntily she discomfited us both. She triumphed with the airy ease of a king-bird routing a crow in the upper blue. Camille had more than once told me that Cecile was wise beyond the hope of her two cousins to emulate her; which had only increased my admiration for Camille; yet now I began to see how the sisters came by their belief. In the present discussion she was easily first among the four of us. At the same time her sensuous graces also took unquestionable preeminence; city-bred though she was, she had the guise of belonging to the landscape, or, rather, of the landscape's belonging, by some fairy prerogative, to her. She seemed just let loose into the world, yet as ready and swift to make right use of it as any humming-bird let into a garden; as untimorous as any such, and as elusive. In this sultry June air she had all the animation both of mind and of frame that might have been expected of her on a keen, clear winter day. Her face never bore the same expression at the beginning and middle, or at either of these and the close, of any of her speeches, yet every change was lovely, the sign of a happy play of feeling, and proof of a mercurial intelligence. No report of them by this untrained pen would fully bear me out, and the best tribute I can offer is to avoid the task. It was a sweet mercy in her to change the subject, and tactful to change it to Charlotte, as if Charlotte were quite an unrelated theme. The cousins vied with each other ever so prettily in telling how beautiful the patient was on her couch of enfeeblement and pain, how her former loveliness had increased, and what new nobility it had taken on. That any such problem overhung her life as that which we had just been weighing, seemed never to have entered their thought, and if they had ever conceived of a passion already conscious between Charlotte and Ferry, they veiled the fact with charming feminine art. When we got back to the house Harry detained me on the veranda alone. Camille told me how long I might tarry. It was heaven to have her bit in my mouth, and I found it hard to be grum even when Harry beat with his good hand the rhythm of "Maiden passing fair, turn away thine eyes." "Dick," he said, suddenly grave as he walked me down the veranda, "her cousin Cecile! isn't it awful? Now that poor girl's gone back to Ned's bedside; back to her torture! Why _do_ they let her? My George! it's merciless! Has her aunt no eyes?" "But, Lieutenant, you don't know she loves him; there are signs, I admit; but proofs, no. She's lost color, and her curves are more slender, but, my goodness! a dozen things might account for that."