He held her hand a moment, and that made her color directly.  “You will come over the farm.  Can you ride?  Have you your habit?”

“No, cousin; but never mind that.  I can put on a long skirt.”

“A skirt!  But, after all, it does not matter a straw what you wear.”

Mary was such a novice that she did not catch the meaning of this on the spot, but half-way to the inn, and in the middle of a conversation, her cheeks were suddenly suffused with blushes.  A young man had admired her and said so.  Very likely that was the way with young men. No doubt they were bolder than young women; but somehow it was not so very objectionable in them.

That short interview was a little era in Mary’s young life.  Walter had fixed his eyes on her with delight, had held her hand some seconds, and admired her to her face.  She began to wonder a little, and flutter a little, and to put off childhood.

Next day, punctual to the minute, Walter drove up to the door in an open carriage drawn by two fast steppers.  He found Mr. Bartley alone, and why? because, at sight of Walter, Mary, for the first time in her life, had flown upstairs to look at herself in the glass before facing the visitor, and to smooth her hair, and retouch a bow, etc., underrating, as usual, the power of beauty, and overrating nullities.  Bartley took this opportunity, and said to young Clifford: 

“I owe you an apology, and a most earnest one.  Can you ever forgive me?”

Walter changed color.  Even this humble allusion to so great an insult was wormwood to him.  He bit his lip, and said: 

“No man can do more than say he is sorry.  I will try to forget it, sir.”

“That is as much as I can expect,” said Bartley, humbly.  “But if you only knew the art, the cunning, the apparent evidence, with which that villain Monckton deluded me—­”

“That I can believe.”

“And permit me one observation before we drop this unhappy subject forever.  If you had done me the honor to come to me as Walter Clifford, why, then, strong and misleading as the evidence was, I should have said, ‘Appearances are deceitful, but no Clifford was ever disloyal.’”

This artful speech conquered Walter Clifford.  He blushed, and bowed a little haughtily at the compliment to the Cliffords.  But his sense of justice was aroused.

“You are right,” said he.  “I must try and see both sides.  If a man sails under false colors, he mustn’t howl if he is mistaken for a pirate.  Let us dismiss the subject forever.  I am Walter Clifford now—­at your service.”

At that moment Mary Bartley came in, beaming with youth and beauty, and illumined the room.  The cousins shook hands, and Walter’s eyes glowed with admiration.

After a few words of greeting he handed Mary into the drag.  Her father followed, and he was about to drive off, when Mary cried out, “Oh, I forgot my skirt, if I am to ride.”