Her face was now glowing like a rose, and she answered quite impatiently, "Pshaw! you know what I mean; and every man of common tact will, in his heart, admit that I am right." "In neither one or the other of the two cases," I replied. "What two cases?" she asked. "Two assertions, I should have called them," answered I; "the one you just now made, and the preceding one, that men are entirely selfish in all that concerns women. I have seen cases in which no selfish motive could be discerned in the beginning, in the course, or in the end of such matters; and, being a good deal older than you are, I have had more means of judging." "Why, how old are you?" she asked abruptly. "Seven-and-twenty," I answered. "I thought so!" she cried, with a joyous laugh; "but you look a good deal older." "Indeed!" I answered, perhaps a little mortified; "but what makes you seem to rejoice that I am seven-and-twenty only?" "Excuse me," she replied, dropping a low curtsy. "I might say, because that makes you just a fit age for myself, or a hundred other civil things. But I would rather say nothing, Sir Richard." "Sir Richard!" I exclaimed. "How came you to give me that name, Miss Davenport?" "Because you are just seven-and-twenty; and because there is 'Richard Conway' printed in white letters upon the black trunks you left at Norfolk," she replied, with an air of funny malice, adding, "at least so your servant told the cook, and the cook told my maid, and my maid told me, dear cousin; and so there's my 'how.'" "Good heaven, this babbling is very provoking!" I exclaimed, greatly annoyed; "it may spoil all our plans." "No fear," she answered; "we are so surrounded by woods and wilds that the secret will keep till next Sunday at least; for the negroes will not see those of any other plantation till then." "And _you_ will tell no one?" I inquired. "Honour!" she replied, in a tone of mock solemnity. "If you do," I said, laughing. "I will tell your uncle, whom I see coming up there, that you and I have been standing this quarter of an hour at the edge of the porch, talking of love all the time." "Love!" she cried, "what is that? I declare such an antediluvian monster has never been once mentioned between us till you brought it this minute out of the blue mud of your own imagination." "A very savoury figure," I answered. "But as to love, if we have not been talking about it, notwithstanding all circumlocutions, we have been thinking about it." "Not a bit," she replied. "We have been talking, and thinking too, of the most opposite things--of the very antipodes of love. Courtship and marriage, if you like; but what has love to do with them, cousin?" And she fixed her full dark eyes upon my face, with a look of the most perfect simplicity--assumed, of course, but very well put on.