“I should like to know, Mrs. Carter, how we are to get on without her?” said Mr. Whacker. “If I were thirty or forty years younger—but there is Charley; eh, Mr. Mum?” “If,” replied Mr. Mum, “I were such as you were thirty or forty years ago, Uncle Tom, I don’t think she could possibly escape.” “And what would become of me, then?” said Mrs. Carter. “How far are they going? I believe she is actually going to take him to the Argo, as they call it. There they go, straight on; he is helping her into the boat now; well, upon my word! What is she up to? This bright sun will tan her dreadfully, of course, but little she cares! She might raise her parasol, at least, instead of poking holes in the sand, as she seems to be doing.” * * * * * “Frightened? Yes, dreadfully,” said Alice, giving her collaborators an account of the interview. “Of course I was; but I was ‘_in_termined,’ as poor old Uncle Dick used to say, to go through with it. You see, my liege-lord that was to be—Mr. Chatterbox, I mean,” tapping Charley with her fan—“had, the evening before, commanded—” “Commanded! Oh!” said Charley, darting his forefinger as an exclamation-point into the middle of a smoke-ring. “Yes, commanded me to do it. I see, Jack, that you have left out that part of our talk (to make room for more of your own nonsense, I suppose) in your account of our conversation; but just as I was about to run up the steps, he stopped me and whispered, ‘_Mind, I wish it!_’” “Oho!” cried Charley, brushing away with a sweep of his hand a wreath that would not work, “that’s the way I talked then, was it?” “Yes, that was what you said, and I—rather—liked it.” “Hear, hear!” murmured Charley, his left eye shut, and slowly moving his head, so as to keep the open centre of a whirling smoke-wreath between his right eye and a certain portrait on the wall. “You know, Jack, every real woman likes the man to be master.” “Hear, hear!” gurgled Charley, in a rather choking voice; for by this time, in his effort to keep his eye on a fly on the ceiling (the ring having floated away from the picture and over his head), he had leaned his head so far back that (to speak rather as a Bushwhacker than as an anatomist) his Adam’s apple was impinging on his vocal cords.