But I am burying my face in Sir Roger’s shoulder, like a shy child.

“I like you!” I say, creeping up quite close to him.  “You were the only one that came to help me.  If it had not been for you, I should be there still!”

CHAPTER XVII.

The bag-affair is quite an old one now—­a fortnight old.  The bag itself has, I believe, retired into the decent privacy of a cupboard, nor is it much more likely to reissue thence than was one of the frail nuns built into the wall in the old times likely to come stepping out again.  Bobby has at length ceased to offer me every object which it devolves upon him to hand me, with a quavering voice and a prolonged stammer, since, though I was at first excellently vulnerable by this weapon of offense, I am now becoming hornily hard and indifferent to it.  We have stepped over the boundaries of June into July.

Yes, June has gone to look for all its dead brothers, wherever—­since they say nothing is ever really lost—­they lie with their stored sweets.  To me, this has been as merry and good a June as any one of my nineteen.

Sir Roger is beginning to talk of going home—­his home, that is—­but rather diffidently and tentatively, as if not quite sure whether the proposal will meet with favor in my eyes.  He need not be nervous on this point.  I, too, am rather anxious and eager to see my house—­my house, if you please!—­I, who have never hitherto possessed any larger residence than a doll’s house, whose whole front wall opened at once, giving one an improbably simultaneous view of kitchen-range, best four-poster, and drawing-room chairs.  I have, it is true, seen photographs of my new house, photographs of its east front, of its west front—­photographs, in its park, of the great old cedar; in its gardens, of its woody pool—­but, to tell you the truth, I want to see it. I have already planned a house-warming, and invited them all to it, a house-warming in which—­oh, absurd!—­I shall sit at the head of the table, and father and mother only at the sides—­I shall tell the people who they are to take in to dinner, and nod my head from the top when dessert is ended.

To-day lam going to write and secure the Brat’s company—­that is, later in the day—­but now it is quite, quite, early, even the letters have not come in.  We have all—­viz., the boys, the girls, and I—­risen (in pursuance of a plan made overnight) preternaturally early, almost as early as I did on my wedding-morning, and are going out to gather mushrooms in the meadow, by the river.  Indignation against the inhabitants of the neighboring town is what has torn us from our morning dreams, the greedy townsfolk, by whom, on every previous occasion, we have found our meadow rifled before we could reach it.  To-day we shall, at least, meet them on equal terms.  We are all rather gapy at first, more especially Algy, who has deferred the making of the greater part of his toilet till his return, looks disheveled, and sounds grumbling But before long both gapes and grumbles depart.