“What a feminine Mephistopheles you are!” she says. Then she throws back the cloud of dark hair which she is combing, and looks at me with her shining eyes. “Perhaps it is a good thing to wander in Arcadia for a little while and realize that life may be happy, and healthy, and free, without any of those things,” she says. “It is something I have needed to learn.” “Which means, I suppose, that you are going to marry Charley, and try living in Arcadia for good. You are a simpleton—but never mind! Stop talking, and go to bed.” “You are mistaken,” she says, with dignity. “Because I don’t choose to marry one man is no reason for supposing I mean to marry another.” “You are an arrant flirt, and a shameful impostor!” I say; and then I go to bed myself. The next morning at breakfast we find that there are grave signs of desertion of another kind. The gentlemen in a body are missing—having taken an early departure for a deer-hunt. Sylvia is much injured and incensed by this proceeding. “I should not mind it so much if they had not known that I wanted to go!” she says. “It is mean and shameful of them to act in so—so underhand a manner. They must have _stolen_ away; they could not even have sounded a horn, or it would have waked me.” “You are mistaken about that,” says one of the ladies. “There was a great deal of noise—blowing of horns and barking of dogs. You must have slept soundly not to have heard it.” “How can anybody help sleeping soundly in this climate?” asks Sylvia, aggrieved. It is the middle of the day before the hunters return, empty-handed—having failed altogether to start a deer, which fact is full of balm to Sylvia’s feelings. She is standing on the piazza with a novel (to which she has been forced to betake herself) in her hand when they ride up, and she proceeds at once to empty the vials of her indignation upon their heads. “Are you not ashamed of yourselves?” she says. “If you had told me that you did not want me, of course I should not have pressed my society upon you; but to go off in this manner, and leave me behind _without a word_—that I call mean in the extreme.” “Look here!” says Eric, “you surely did not expect to be taken on a regular deer-hunt? Why, you would find nothing entertaining in it, and you would be amazingly in the way besides.” This remark wounds Sylvia deeply. In the way! She is evidently unable to imagine that such a thing could be within the remotest range of possibility. A flush comes over her face; she draws herself up. “In that case, I have nothing more to say,” she remarks, and moves away like a queen. With a laugh, Charley springs from his horse and follows her. She has retreated to the end of the piazza, where Mrs. Cardigan and Mr. Lanier conducted their flirtation the night before, and opened her novel with the air of one intensely absorbed—an air, however, which does not impose upon the young man, who comes up smiling.