“I tell you what, Bailey,” said that young gentleman, “Laura is an old veteran, and carries too many guns for a youngster.  She can’t resist a flirtation; I believe she’d flirt with an infant in arms.  There’s hardly a fellow in the school that hasn’t worn her colors and some of her hair.  She doesn’t give out any more of her own hair now.  It’s been pretty well used up.  The demand was greater than the supply, you see.  It’s all very well to correspond with Laura, but as to looking for anything serious from her, the knowing ones don’t.  Hope I haven’t hurt your feelings, old boy,” (that was a soothing stroke of flattery to call me “old boy,”) “but it was my duty as a friend and a Centipede to let you know who you were dealing with.”

Such was the advice given me by that time-stricken, careworn, and embittered man of the world, who was sixteen years old if he was a day.

I dropped Laura.  In the course of the next twelve months I had perhaps three or four similar experiences, and the conclusion was forced upon me that I was not a boy likely to distinguish myself in this branch of business.

I fought shy of Primrose Hall from that moment.  Smiles were smiled over the boxwood hedge, and little hands were occasionally kissed to me; but I only winked my eye patronizingly, and passed on.  I never renewed tender relations with Miss Gibbs’s young ladies.  All this occurred during my first year and a half at Rivermouth.

Between my studies at school, my out-door recreations, and the hurts my vanity received, I managed to escape for the time being any very serious attack of that love fever which, like the measles, is almost certain to seize upon a boy sooner or later.  I was not to be an exception.  I was merely biding my time.  The incidents I have now to relate took place shortly after the events described in the last chapter.

In a life so tranquil and circumscribed as ours in the Nutter House, a visitor was a novelty of no little importance.  The whole household awoke from its quietude one morning when the Captain announced that a young niece of his from New York was to spend a few weeks with us.

The blue-chintz room, into which a ray of sun was never allowed to penetrate, was thrown open and dusted, and its mouldy air made sweet with a bouquet of pot-roses placed on the old-fashioned bureau.  Kitty was busy all the forenoon washing off the sidewalk and sand-papering the great brass knocker on our front-door; and Miss Abigail was up to her elbows in a pigeon-pie.

I felt sure it was for no ordinary person that all these preparations were in progress; and I was right.  Miss Nelly Glentworth was no ordinary person.  I shall never believe she was.  There may have been lovelier women, though I have never seen them; there may have been more brilliant women, though it has not been my fortune to meet them; but that there was ever a more charming one than Nelly Glentworth is a proposition against which I contend.