Amid such scenes as this has this tale been tacked together. Can the reader wonder at its harum-scarum way of getting itself told? Am I not driving a team of mustangs? “They are all alike,” puffed Charley; “they love us to distraction, but we must not know it. Go on, my boy.” I read on amid much hilarity; and it was such reception of this solitary effort of my individual muse that induced me to retain it in the body of the work. At last we came to the passage where occurred the coincidence to which I have alluded. In my fabulous and starry account of the billing and cooing on the piazza, I make Charley ask, _May my heart beat in the frolic rhythm of the scherzo?_ This—for why should I hide my harmless self-content from my friend, the reader?—this I don’t deny that I thought a very neat and unhackneyed way of asking a girl whether she gave you leave to consider yourself a happy dog. It was my little climax, and—I confess it—my heart fluttered a little as I drew near the passage, in anticipation of the plaudits I trusted to receive. No clapping of hands. A dead silence, rather; and looking up, I saw my friends staring at one another. “What’s the matter?” asked I, a little sheepishly. “I rather thought,” I stammered, “that—that that was—not so bad?” “Mr. Frobisher, I am astonished at you!” [At that period it was not usual for Virginia wives to call their husbands by their Christian names.] “Indeed, my dear—” “You need not say one word! I should not have thought it of you, that’s all!” “But, Alice—” “Why, what’s the matter?” asked I, bewildered. “Oh, nothing!” said Alice, with a toss of her head. “Jack-Whack, I’ll tell you; she thinks I have been blabbing to you.” “Thinks!” “But I have not!” “Do you mean to tell me that Jack, without a hint from you—actually—” she hesitated. “‘Frolic rhythm of the scherzo!’” I shouted, in joyous derision; “and you positively used that phrase, you sentimental old fraud!” Charley turned very red,—redder still, when Alice, relieved of the suspicion that he had been revealing their little love-mysteries, laughed merrily at his discomfiture. “It was not quite so b-b-b-b-ad as that. I admit the ‘scherzo’ part; b-b-b-ut ‘frolic rhythm’! I was not so many kinds of an idiot as that amounts to.” And so—I swear it by the shades of Epaminondas—I had actually hit upon the very word,—and truth is again stranger than fiction. CHAPTER XLVIII. Time was pressing. In another week these long-continued and long-to-be-remembered Christmas festivities would come to an end. Yesterday, Alice had failed to extract any information from Charley. To-day, she would make another effort.