“It’s horrid without you!” Fanny said, giving her hands a squeeze. “You can’t think!”

Abby bent to drop a kiss on her check, but said with mock sympathy: “My poor darling! So strict and unkind as Aunt Selina has been! I feared it would be so.”

“That’s what I’ve missed so much!” Fanny said, with a ripple of mirth. “I am most sincerely attached to Aunt Selina, but—but she is not a great jokesmith, is she? And not a bit corky!”

“I shouldn’t think so,” responded Abby cautiously. “Not that I know what corky means, but it sounds very unlike Selina—and, I may add, sadly unlike the language to be expected of a girl of genteel upbringing!”

That made Fanny’s eyes dance. “Yes—slang! It means—oh, bright, and lively! Like you!”

“Does it indeed? I collect you mean to pay me a handsome compliment, but if ever you dare to attach such an epithet to me again, Fanny, I shall—I shall—well, I don’t yet know what I shall do, but you may depend upon it that it will be something terrible! Corky! Good God!”

“I won’t,” Fanny promised. “Now, do, do be serious, beloved! I have so much to tell you. Something of—of the first importance.”

Abby knew a craven impulse to fob her off, but subdued it, saying in what she hoped was not a hollow voice: “No, have you? Then I will engage to be perfectly serious. What is it?”

Fanny directed a searching look at her. “Didn’t Aunt Selina—or Uncle James, perhaps—tell you about—about Mr Calverleigh?”

“About Mr—? Oh! Is he the London smart you’ve slain with one dart from your eyes? To be sure they did, and very diverting I thought them! That is to say,” she corrected herself, in a ludicrously severe tone, “that of course they are very right in thinking you to be far too young to be setting up a flirt! Most forward of you, my love—quite improper!”

She won no answering gleam. “It isn’t like that,” Fanny said. “From the very first moment that we met—” She paused, and drew a long breath. “We loved one another!” she blurted out.