"How you do run on!" merely remarked Bell, who probably enjoyed the wild girl's conversation quite as much as she was capable of enjoying anything.
"Yes," said Joe, "and I should like to know any reason for stopping, at least before our impressed beau comes back. Has he gone off to make arrangements with the fortune-teller, I wonder, so as to play a trick upon us when we get there?"
"Eh," said Bell, a little startled, "could such a trick be possible!"
"Very possible, my dear!" said Joe. "I'll warrant such things have been done, and my gentleman looks just mischievous enough. But no--he would not _dare_ do such a thing, for he could see with half an eye that if he did I should one day pay him for it!"
"If you ever had a chance!" remarked Bell with some approach to a sneer.
"Oh," said Joe. "Trust me for that! Didn't I just tell you that I had half made up my mind to take him? and if I should, you know, I should have plenty of time to bring him into the proper subjection."
"How do you know but he may be married?" asked Bell, who had a little more forethought than Miss Joe in certain directions.
"Humph!" said Joe, "that _would_ be awkward, especially as I am not quite ready, yet, for an elopement and the subsequent flattering paragraphs in the papers, about 'the beautiful and accomplished Miss J.H.' having left for Europe on the last steamer from Boston, in company with 'the popular journalist but sad Lothario, Mr. T.L., who has left an interesting wife and two children to deplore the departure of the husband and father from the paths of rectitude.'"
"Well, you _are_ incorrigible!" laughed Miss Crawford, fairly carried away by the irresistible current of the wild girl's humor. "How can you talk so flippantly of things so deplorable?"
"I scarcely know, myself!" was the answer. "But there is really a dash of romance about such things, which almost makes them endurable. Poor Mrs. Brannan made a mess of it, to be sure, coming out at last with a ruined character and the widow of a man several ranks lower in the army than the husband from whom she had run away; but was there not something chivalrous in Wyman coming back at once at the breaking out of the war, and sending an offer to the man he had injured, to afford him any satisfaction he might think proper to demand?"
