“Thank you, sir.”

“All true—­but about Williamsburg—­I was, I say, a melancholy sample of the effect produced by a kind and friendly speech from a lady.  Observe, that the said speech was perfectly commonplace, and sprung, I’m sure, from the speaker’s general amiability; and yet, what must I do, but go and fall in love with her.”

“Oh!” from Fanny.

“Yes—­true as truth itself; and, as a consequence, my friends, for the first, and only time, had a good joke against me.  They had a tale about my going to his Excellency, the Governor’s palace, to look at the great map there—­all for the purpose of finding where the country was in which she lived; for, observe, she was only on a visit to Williamsburg—­of studying out this boundary, and that—­this river to cross, and that place to stop at,—­the time it would take to carry my affections over them—­and all the thousand details.  Of course, this was not true, my darling Fanny, at least—­”

“Ralph, you shall stop talking to me like a child!” exclaimed Fanny, who had listened to the details of Mr. Ashley’s passion with more and more constraint; “please to remember that I am not a baby, sir.”

Ralph looked at the lovely face, with its rosy-cheeks and flashing eyes, and burst out laughing.

“There, you are as angry as Cleopatra, when the slave brought her bad news—­and, by Jove, Fanny, you are twice as lovely.  Really! you have improved wonderfully.  Your eyes, at this moment, are as brilliant as fire—­your lips like carnation—­and your face like sunlit gold; recollect, I’m a poet.  I’m positively rejoiced at the good luck which made me bring such a lovely expression into your fair countenance.”

Fanny turned her head away.

“Come now, Fanny,” said Ralph, seriously, “I do believe you are going to find fault with my nonsense.”

No reply.

Mr. Ralph Ashley heaved a sigh; and was silent.

“You treat me like a child,” said Fanny, reproachfully; “I am not a child.”

“You certainly are not, my dearest Fanny—­you are a charming young lady—­the most delicious of your sex.”

And Mr. Ralph Ashley accompanied these words with a glance so ludicrously languishing, that Fanny, unable to command herself, burst into laughter; and the quarrel was all made up, if quarrel it indeed had been.

“You were a child in old times,” said Mr. Ashley, throwing his foot elegantly over his knee; “and, I recollect, had a perfect genius for blindman’s-buff; but, of course, at sixteen you have ‘put away’ all those infantile or ’childish things’—­though I am sincerely rejoiced to see that you have not ‘become a man.’”

Fanny laughed.

“I wish I was,” she said.

“What?”

“Why a man.”

“Oh! you’re very well as you are;—­though if you were a ‘youth,’ I’m sure, Fanny dear, I should be desperately fond of you.”

“Quite likely.”