"Oh, it must be so fine to drive in a handsome carriage with the crowd.
I wish I could try it. Does it cost so very much?" she asked, and Neil
detested himself because he did not at once offer to take her and her
father for the coveted drive.
"Could he do it?" he asked himself many times, deciding finally that he
could not face his fashionable friends, and, more than all, his mother
and Blanche, with these country cousins--Archie, in his threadbare coat,
and Bessie, in her linen gown, with the big puffs at the top of the
sleeves.
Had she been less beautiful he might venture it, but everybody would
look at that face and turn to look again, and wonder who she was, and
question him about her.
No, he couldn't do it, and so he went away at last, deciding to take the
underground road to St. James Park, and meeting, as he was entering the
station, Jack Trevellian coming out.
"Hallo, Hallo!" was said by each to the other, while both looked a
little conscious, and Neil burst out, impulsively, "I say, Jack, what
brings you over here?"
"The same which brought you, I dare say," Jack replied.
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