KEEPING A SECRET.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6090, 29 January 1898, Page 3

KEEPING A SECRET.

(Pott Mall Gazette.) The moment she came into the room my friend sat down plump, as though exhausted with the weight of what she had been carrying, and quite intending that I should know it. Her mouth was very pursed and determined — wild horses shouldn't make her, &c, was the vision it gave me. Then with a flourish of her hands, to give reins to my imagination, she broke loose. " Oh, I have been told such a secret !" " I see you have," said T. She challenged me at that, like a sentry outside a powder magazine. " What do you mean by ' you see I have ? '" " When you carry a secret in your bosom, you have" — I reached about for a comparison — "such a decollete air about you." This she took as though it was a downright personal remark ; she gave me an offended view of her back. I assured her that the simile applied all the way round. " I won't tell you a word," she said ; " not a word ! I didn't mean to, and I won't now !" " Then, for once," said I, " I may talk to you, and you will listen ; I don't often get such an opportunity." "Oh, I know I'm not air-tight as a rule," she admitted. " You. can be as nasty as you like, but I won't answer you !" " You don't often come here," I retorted, "on purpose not to tell me a secret. I wonder why you have taken the trouble to be so rude to-day." "Rude ?" " Certainly ! whispering in company is rude ; and keeping a secret in company is just as rude, if you tell people you are doing it." She whipped round before I had expected her, and caught some tell-tale villainy. in my countenance. " How dare you," she said, "be taking mean advantages of me behind my back ?" " What was I doing ?" " Why, you were going to worm it out of me without my seeing. That's where a mana such a coward ; you couldn't do it to my face !" " I do wish you would let me talk," I remonstrated. " 1 have several secrets lam willing and wanting to tell you, if you will only have the grace to listen." She listened with perfect indifference while I brushed the fringe of a few subjects of common interest, and told tentative lies which would go out of her head the day after to-morrow. My imagination grew stale, and my confidences became uninteresting ; some were true, and she had heard of them. "I don't call a secret a real secret," she moaned in repressive pain " unless you've just been told it, antfnobodj else has !" , i "It generally is not," I agreed, "in this v iclfed world. Why, my dear child, what. ! ever have you been leaning your bad against?" "Oh, not paint?" she im pfored. " Don't say its paint on my besl I and only ! " " But where have you beei !to get paint on you?" I asked doubt fully ; for I was not sure yet that it was paint •' It must have' been when I said good-by< to her ; she had her brushes ! " I receivec a vision of ecstatic embraces between tw< maidens secretively confidential. "Tha must be your friend the genius; thi woman who starves trying to pain portraits." " But she does paint them and they pay. Oh, they do pay some times ! " I had got at the microbe of the mystery and while I cleaned away imaginary spot from my friend's back, I made guilty bab ! blings in her ear. "You know, I alway J think it's a mistake for a woman to bei genius, because when she goes and get marritd it's so much power of being inde pendent wasted." " But," said my fnen< eagerly, "she can always go on painting even ifc she has to marry a barouet; "Yes," said I, and a particular younj j baronet, still strongly bound by hi mother's apron-strings, roso clear in m; mind ; " but his people won't liko it. Am besides— baroncta and geniusos have al way such different religions." " Now that's just .whAt.l»wantta'kn |OW ! she -exclaimed. _ . you- : l flunk^it' reaU;

matters ? " "It may not to the genius, but it will to the haronefc; besides, there is the ceremony to be got over ; geniuses always want to lbe married in registry offices, and a baronet can't be." "Oh, but he can be privately; and then afterwaras it will be no use his mother objecting. In fact, don't you see, that's why it s a tramp card ; the mother would make peace to have him married in church in order to conceal the registry office marriage ; so, in the v end, it will all come out happily, and he will marry publicly with his mother's consent." I had finished with the paint-spots ; she' gave a little gasp and said, " "What a capital story it would make; I wish that sort of thin? happened in real life." "It never does," I said cruelly. " Why shouldn't it?" she demanded. "What can happen to prevent it ? " " A hundred things," said I. "The genius may tell a particular friend jusfc two days before the Eegistry Office; and the particular friend may tell a particular friend of the baronet's mother, and . the baronet's mother may prevent him making a happy fool of himself,^ which she can if all the money happens to be hers for life." She became pensive. "I do dislike modern money-made baronetcies," she said, "because they haven't had time to got entailed in the proper aristocratic way in ■which mothers can't iuterfere." I vexed her soul with the most indifferent remark I could muster, on a subject wholly different from the one she was bent on concealing from me. It was curious to behold her first gesture of irritation change to a stealthy satisfaction that she had got me away from dangerous personalities. For the next half-hour we conversed in circles, she leading round to mixed marriages, registry offices, parental tyranny, the emancipation of virtuous youth, and the entrusting of him with wealth, affections, and a title — these things and what not, and I resolutely and softly leading her away to remoter topics. I fear she never found my conversation so dull ao she did while for nearly one hour I struggled to make her keep some figment of a rag of concealment over the excitement which charged her mind. When she asked if it .was possible to have bridesmaids at a marriage clandestinely conducted at a registry office, I had to tell her it was time she went. On the stairs she asked if registry office bride 3 wore orange blossom. _ I told her to go to a registry office marriage and see. This struck her as excruciatingly funny — my telling her to go and see. At the door she triumphantly reminded me that for all my trying I had not got her secret out of her ; and I assented that until my eyes flash Eoentgen rays the task was beyond iay powers. Then she left me ; and I returned to my room, and, sitting down, thought long and hard whether I ought to tell my particular friend the baronet's mother.