With frantic haste
I seized the handle--it did not yield; the door was fastened by a spring
lock, and I was a prisoner!
Imagine my dismay! Florence stood looking at me, and there was a smile on
her face that she, with great difficulty restrained from breaking into a
decided ha! ha! Just then I would have sold myself to any reliable man
for a six-pence, and thirty days credit.
Mortified and crestfallen, I was strongly inclined to follow the example
of the heroines in sensation novels, and burst into tears; but crying, it
is said, makes the nose red, and, remembering this, I forbore.
I suppose Florence pitied me; she must have seen from the woe begone
expression of my face that I was in the last stages of human endurance,
for she came quietly to my side and laid her hand on my arm.
"Come in, Roy," she said, kindly--almost tenderly, I thought--and drew me
into a small boudoir opposite the sitting-room. Things in the latter
apartment were too nearly wrecked to make it pleasant for occupation,
I suppose.
"There," she said, seating me on a sofa by her side, and speaking in a
consoling tone one would use to a child who had burnt his apron, or broke
the sugar-bowl, "don't think anything more of it." She was wiping the
blood from pussy's autograph on my face with her handkerchief--"Accidents
will happen, you know!"
She was so close to me--her sweet face so very near mine--and the
temptation was so great that I trust I may be excused, especially as I
am a bashful man, and not in the habit of committing such indiscretions.
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