you like.  They are folded small because they had to be put in a nick in a tree, called by those amiable young ladies, a post-office.”

“I’m real sorry I made you cry, Eliza.  It’s as well I didn’t remain or I might have begun admiring of you again, which might have ended in breaking my vow to be—­Only your ex-admirer, CYRIL, P. H——.”

“Oh!” cried Blue, her tears dried by the fire of injury, “we never talked to him except when he talked to us—­never!”

“There’s a postscript,” said Sophia, and then she read it.

   “P.S.  They used to cock their eyes at me when they saw me over
   the fence.  You had better tell them not to do it; I could not bear to
   think of them doing it to anyone else.”

“Oh!” cried Red, “Oh—­h! he never said to us that we cocked our eyes.  He said once to Blue that the way she curled her eyelashes at him was real captivating.”

Sophia rose delivering her final word:  “Nothing could be more utterly vulgar than to flirt with a young man who is beneath you in station just because he happens to be thrown in your way.”

CHAPTER XII.

When Sophia went to the hotel next morning, Eliza was not to be found.  She was not in, and no one knew where she was.  Mr. Hutchins was inclined to grumble at her absence as an act of high-handed liberty, but Miss Rexford was not interested in his comments.  She went back to her work at home, and felt in dread of the visit which she had arranged for Alec Trenholme to make that day.  She began to be afraid that, having no information of importance with which to absorb his attention, he might to some extent make a fool of himself.  Having seen incipient signs of this state of things, she took for granted it would grow.

When the expected caller did come, Sophia, because the servant could still do but little, was at work in the dairy, and she sent one of the children to ask him to come into the yard.  The dairy was a pleasant place; it was a long low stone room, with two doors opening on the green yard.  The roof of it was shaded by a tree planted for that purpose, and not many feet from its end wall the cool blue river ran.  A queen could not have had a sweeter place for an audience chamber, albeit there was need of paint and repairs, and the wooden doorstep was almost worn away.

Sophia, churn-handle in hand, greeted her visitor without apology.  She had expected that this churn-handle, the evidence of work to be done, would act as a check upon feeling, but she saw with little more than a glance that such check was superfluous; there was no sign of intoxication from the wine of graciousness which she had held to his lips when last she saw him.  As he talked to her he stood on the short white clover outside the door’s decaying lintel.  He had a good deal to say about Bates, and more about Sissy Cameron, and Sophia found that she had a good deal to say in answer.