"When the horses were brought up on the gravelled road, and all things in readiness for my departure, I cast a furtive glance at that too-knowing and too-beautiful little brunette, who calls you cousin, to see how she was about to feel on the solemn occasion. Her looks were perfectly inexplicable. I have thought of them ever since, but for my life I cannot say in what feelings they had their origin. There was neither sorrow, joy, love, hatred, revenge, hope, despair, nor any other definable emotion. There was a scarcely perceptible smile, a slight shutting of the corner of one eye, and a mock solemnity of the other unruly features, as if one was winking to the other rebels as much as to say, 'wait till he's out of hearing, and we will have a rare laugh at his expense.' It was just such a look as would make a man say, 'Zounds and fury, madam, you'll never see me again; farewell, for ever;' and then be laughed at for his pains. "But what sort of a look was it? It was a very knowing look, I am sure of that. She looked as if she read all the inward workings of my moral machinery. It was a serio-comic look; produced, no doubt, by the idea that she was scanning me thoroughly, while I imagined that I could see just as clearly through her. In other words, as I have somewhere else beautifully expressed it, she thought me 'pretty considerable much of an ass,' and I am pretty considerable much of her opinion, at least before ladies. It is somewhat singular that this tendency to display my weak side should have developed itself at the very time when I most desired to appear to advantage. "At last the parting moment came. I had bidden your mother farewell in the breakfast-room, and then proceeded to the front door, where stood Virginia Bell. "'I think it very doubtful,' said I, 'whether I shall be enabled to take your aunt's house in my route home.' "'You are not going to run away with cousin's favourite horse, are you?' said she. "By the Great Mogul! in my earnestness to invent a pathetic lie, I forgot to arrange the consistency of the plot. "'True, true!' said I, stammering; 'then I must indeed run my head into danger again!' saying which I sprang upon your horse, and rode like a country doctor who has no practice. By-the-by, that was nearer to an avowal than I have ever come yet; your joyous, fun-loving creatures are the most difficult to address in the world. "Oh! if I only had such a one in love with me, what a race I would lead her! I would punish the whole class of unapproachable little mischievous misses! I would make her ogle me at church; hang on my arm to the theatre; sigh by the fire-side, and weep when she went to bed; I would almost break her heart before I would take the least pity upon her.