ween us; and I could feel her heart only just outside my own,
her life beating on so close to mine, that I was aware of every breath in
it. A flit is made upstairs--a hat and a cloak put on--and I no more
dare to touch her than--" Thought failed him, and he returned to
realities.

But this was an endurable misery in comparison with what followed. Mr.
Shiner and his watch-chain, taking the intrusive advantage that ardent
bachelors who are going homeward along the same road as a pretty young
woman always do take of that circumstance, came forward to assure
Fancy--with a total disregard of Dick's emotions, and in tones which were
certainly not frigid--that he (Shiner) was not the man to go to bed
before seeing his Lady Fair safe within her own door--not he, nobody
should say he was that;--and that he would not leave her side an inch
till the thing was done--drown him if he would. The proposal was
assented to by Miss Day, in Dick's foreboding judgment, with one
degree--or at any rate, an appreciable fraction of a degree--of warmth
beyond that required by a disinterested desire for protection from the
dangers of the night.

All was over; and Dick surveyed the chair she had last occupied, looking
now like a setting from which the gem has been torn. There stood her
glass, and the romantic teaspoonful of elder wine at the bottom that she
couldn't drink by trying ever so hard, in obedience to the mighty
arguments of the tranter (his hand coming down upon her shoulder the
while, like a Nasmyth hammer); but the drinker was there no longer. There
were the nine or ten pretty little crumbs she had left on her plate; but
the eater was no more seen.

There seemed a disagreeable closeness of relationship between himself and
the members of his family, now that they were left alone again face to
face. His father seemed quite offensive for appearing to be in just as
high spirits as when the guests were there; and as for grandfather James
(who had not yet left), he was quite fiendish in being rather glad they
were gone.

"Really," said the tranter, in a tone of placid satisfaction, "I've had
so little time to attend to myself all the evenen, that I mean to enjoy a
quiet meal now! A slice of this here ham--neither too fat nor too
lean--so; and then a drop of this vinegar and pickles--there, that's
it--and I shall be as fresh as a lark again! And to tell the truth, my
sonny, my inside has been as dry as a lime-basket all night."