So Phyllida went to bedew her lavendered pillow. Anything was better than listening to her mother's perpetual reproaches. Anything, anything was better. Even to be betrayed. Ha! ha! now I think for the first time you will admit Miss Phyllida to be a true heroine. Poor Clarie Harlowe! How Phyllida had wept over her adventures and, even in the midst of tears, how quick she had always been to thrust the forbidden volumes out of sight when she heard her mother's step on the stairs. Poor Clarie Harlowe! She began to sign her name to innumerable nobly penitent epistles. _Your cruelly abandoned Phyllida. Your wretched, but still loving Phyllida. Your heartbroken, hopeless Phyllida. Your betrayed daughter Phyllida. Your forsaken, but affectionate Phyllida. Your seduced (or was it seducted, or abduced, or abducted?) Phyllida_. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! what a muddle fine language was to be sure! I have not yet apologized for my very ancient story, but faith! you must blame the period and the intolerable system of female education. Amor had either to be a Lovelace or a Joseph at a time when young maidenhood fainted before an ardent glance. After all we do not now apologize for our strong silent men and hysterical girls. Why should we? And yet for my own part I love better your talkative blackguard; I have known so many strong silent men, and they were all fools or Scotsmen. During this digression, Phyllida has fallen asleep, her face flushed and dabbled with spent tears, her chestnut hair in golden filigree upon the pillow and, where the sleeve of her bedgown has retreated, a rosy arm whose little fist is clenched in maiden despair. Poor foolish child! Why would you fall in love? Untenanted, your dearest gate swings in the wind to-night, but you will not mount again upon its topmost mossy bar. You will never again view with the same excitement the huntsmen over the hill-top; they will mean less to you; their pink coats will be quite dingy when next you say good morning to old Nick Runnalls the Whip. For my part, I do not believe that hot buttered apple-pies will taste so sweet when next you eat them in the long cool kitchen with its pot of marjoram and shaded sunlight. And as for your bed-chamber with casements abob with peering rosebuds, I doubt the shelves will not soon be disturbed to make a place for new trophies. Once you thought it a day of days when you found the thigh-bone of a horse or the skull of a badger. They hang on the walls now, poor relicks of an outworn delight. All this shall go for a balcony in the Haymarket and a goldfinch in a gilt cage. Foolish child! Away down in Hampshire the goldfinches build green nests in the orchard. Phyllida! sweet, headlong, heedless Phyllida! * * * * * "I blame you, Betty. I blame you, vixen. Why you cannot model yourself on Thomas passes my comprehension." Thus the widow.