of you."

"Afraid!" she returned. "And of _me_? Oh cruel, cruel ARCHIBALD. Is it
for this that I have passed many a sleepless night, awaking unrefreshed
with haggard orbs? Is it for this that I've pined away and refused meat
victuals?"

She paused. Her heart was beating violently. She took from her pocket a
copy of the _Ledger_, adjusted her eye-glasses, and continued:

"ARCHIBALD BLINKSOP, for weeks I have basked in the sunlight of your
existence. Your celestial smile, shedding a tranquil calm o'er my
perturbed spirit, has been my daily sustenance. Your ethereal form,
beautiful as an houri, has, with its subtle fascination, enthralled and
steeped in bliss my innermost soul, lifting me as it were into a purer,
a holier existence. Your--"

"Oh-h," moaned the wretched ARCHIBALD, "_please_ stop. That's COBB, Jr.
I _know_ it is. When I was sea-sick on the canal, they read a chapter to
me just like that, instead of giving me an emetic, and I was out of my
head all next day."

"But you _do_ love me, don't you, ARCHIBALD?--just a very small
fragment, you know."

She seized him by the ear and kissed him twice.

"Come, own up now," said she, "that from the first moment you saw me,
you have felt a sort of a spooney hankering, and a general looseness,
including a desire to write poetry and use hair-oil, and wear pretty