"Oh, that would be perfectly splendid!" she said. "I have
ever so often thought that it was a shame that you should be
deprived of the pleasures you so much enjoy, which I see you can
find here and nowhere else. Now, I have a plan which I think
will work splendidly. We are a very small family. Why shouldn't
you come here and live with us? There is plenty of room, and I
know father and mother would be very glad, and you can pay your
board, if that would please you better. You can have the room at
the top of the tower for your study and your smoking den, and the
room under it can be your bedroom, so you can be just as
independent as you please of the rest of us, and you can be
living on your own place without interfering with us in the
least. In fact, it would be ever so nice, especially as I am in
the habit of going away to the sea-shore with my aunt every
summer for six weeks, and I was thinking how lonely it would be
this year for father and mother to stay here all by themselves."

The tower and the room under it! For me! What a contemptibly
little-minded and insignificant person she must think me. The
words with which I strove to tell her that I wished to live here
as lord, with her as my queen, would not come. She looked at me
for a moment as I stood on the brink of saying something but not
saying it, and then she turned suddenly toward the hammock.

"Did you see anything of a fan I left here?" she said. "I
know I left it here, but when I came yesterday it was gone.
Perhaps you may have noticed it somewhere--"

Now, the morning before, I had taken that fan home with me.
It was an awkward thing to carry, but I had concealed it under my