carried her bonnet—a pretty little bonnet with blue lining and ribbons, which must have made it become her exceedingly when on—slung over her arm for the occasion, and filled with flowers, which last, in the flutter incidental to the loss of the violet, were liberally scattered over the ground.
Her companion gathered them again, with a slight laugh: "Then you really have forgotten me?" he said, while so employed. "I who once fished and hunted for your especial benefit, and have never been in love since! Suppose I had been on the opposite side of this mill-race, and so unable to reveal myself, and you had gone away as you were doing a minute ago without recognizing me? I know I should have fallen into a state of low melancholy. Oh! by Jove! I recollect," the young gentleman added, rising in a sudden and stroking the ornament in question, "'t is this moustache—this grisly moustache which makes the difference—and come now! I lay an even wager—this violet against your bonnet of flowers—that who the present speaker really may be is a question this moment in your—a, well—lovely head."
The lovely head was shaken half-pettishly, half in denial. "I knew you very well, Mr. Clarence," the owner of it said, "but I—"
"Well?" said Mr. Clarence.
"I—am not to be treated like a school-girl."
"No?" said Clarence, laughing.
"No. And as for your moustache disguising you"—here the blue eyes of Miss Jones glanced at the downy indication of a beard which the owner thereof had termed grisly, and whether that a moustache is always fascinating in female eyes, or that it was not in the power of such celestial orbs to long display anger toward any one, all appearance of vexation quickly vanished, and her companion held out his hand, from which he had drawn his glove. Yes, this young Brummel had been actually angling in gloves, the identical white kids in which, perhaps, he had handed Miss Georgiana McKrell, or the lively Mrs. Tomtit to supper, two weeks before, at Newport!
Indeed, if Miss Mary Jones had failed to remember in Mr. Clarence Van Trump the little boy in corduroy pantaloons who had been her assiduous "sweetheart" once upon a time years before,
