No amount of sponging would get the stains away from my horrid red eyelids.  I slunk into my seat at the breakfast-table, not knowing that one of the maids had dropped a letter from Charles into my hand, and that I had opened it and was holding it open.  The letter, as I found afterwards, told me that Charles has received an order from his uncle to go over to Mr. Pollingray’s estate in Dauphiny on business.  I am not sorry that they should have supposed I was silly enough to cry at the thought of Charles’s crossing the Channel.  They did imagine it, I know; for by and by Miss Pollingray whispered:  ’Les absents n’auront pas tort, cette fois, n’est-ce-pas?  ’And Mr. Pollingray was cruelly gentle:  an air of ‘I would not intrude on such emotions’; and I heightened their delusions as much as I could:  there was no other way of accounting for my pantomime face.  Why should he fancy I suffered so terribly?  He talked with an excited cheerfulness meant to relieve me, of course, but there was no justification for his deeming me a love-sick kind of woe-begone ballad girl.  It caused him likewise to adopt a manner—­what to call it, I cannot think:  tender respect, frigid regard, anything that accompanies and belongs to the pressure of your hand with the finger-tips.  He said goodbye so tenderly that I would have kissed his sleeve.  The effort to restrain myself made me like an icicle.  Oh! adieu, mon parrain!

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

A wise man will not squander his laughter if he can help it
A woman is hurt if you do not confide to her your plans
Gentleman in a good state of preservation
Imparting the usual chorus of yesses to his own mind
In every difficulty, patience is a life-belt
Knew my friend to be one of the most absent-minded of men
Rapture of obliviousness
Telling her anything, she makes half a face in anticipation
When you have done laughing with her, you can laugh at her

[The End]

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