"Make her tell. We're all interested. It's
news to us that Charlotte ever had a beau."
If Josephine had not said that, I might not have gone on. But
she did say it, and, moreover, I caught Mary Gillespie and Adella
Gilbert exchanging significant smiles. That settled it, and made
me quite reckless. "In for a penny, in for a pound," thought I,
and I said with a pensive smile:
"Nobody here knew anything about him, and it was all long, long
ago."
"What was his name?" asked Wilhelmina.
"Cecil Fenwick," I answered promptly. Cecil had always been my
favorite name for a man; it figured quite frequently in the blank
book. As for the Fenwick part of it, I had a bit of newspaper in
my hand, measuring a hem, with "Try Fenwick's Porous Plasters"
printed across it, and I simply joined the two in sudden and
irrevocable matrimony.
"Where did you meet him?" asked Georgie.
I hastily reviewed my past. There was only one place to locate
Cecil Fenwick. The only time I had ever been far enough away
from Avonlea in my life was when I was eighteen and had gone to
visit an aunt in New Brunswick.
"In Blakely, New Brunswick," I said, almost believing that I had
when I saw how they all took it in unsuspectingly. "I was just
eighteen and he was twenty-three."
"What did he look like?" Susette wanted to know.
"Oh, he was very handsome." I proceeded glibly to sketch my
ideal. To tell the dreadful truth, I was enjoying myself; I
could see respect dawning in those girls' eyes, and I knew that I
had forever thrown off my reproach.
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