et
which it is delightful to share with the woman you wish to please.

Why won't women sometimes enlighten a fellow a little in this dark
valley that lies between intimate acquaintance and the awful final
proposal? To be sure, there are kind souls who will come more than
halfway to meet you, but they are always sure to be those you don't
want to meet. The woman you want is always as reticent as a nut, and
leaves you the whole work of this last dread scene without a bit of
help on her part. To be sure, she smiles on you; but what of that? You
see she smiles also on Tom, Dick, and Harry.

"Bright as the sun her eyes the gazers strike;
And, like the sun, they shine on all alike."

I fought out a battle of two or three weeks with my fair foe, trying
to get in advance some hint from her as to what she would do with me
if I put myself at her mercy. No use. Our sex may as well give up
first as last before one of these quiet, resolved, little pieces of
femininity, who are perfect mistresses of all the peculiar weapons,
defensive and offensive, of womanhood. There was nothing for it but to
surrender at discretion; but when I had done this, I was granted all
the honors of war. Mrs. McIntyre received me with an old-fashioned
maternal blessing, and all was as happy as possible.

"And now," said Mary, "I suppose, sir, you will claim a right to know
all about me."

"Something of the sort," I said complacently.

"I know you have been dying of curiosity ever since I was waiting
behind your lordship's chair at your mother's. I knew you suspected
something then,--confess now."

"But what could have led you there?"

"Just hear. My mother, who was Mrs. McIntyre's sister, had by a first
marriage only myself. Shortly after my father's death, she married a
widower with several children. As long as she lived, I never knew what
want or care or trouble was; but just as I was entering upon my
seventeenth year she died. A year after her death, my stepfather, who
was one of those men devoted to matrimony at all hazards, married
another woman, by whom he had children.

"In a few years more, he died; and his affairs, on examination, proved
to be in a very bad state; there was, in fact, scarcely anything for
us to live on. Our stepmother had a settlement from her brother. The
two other daughters of my father were married, and went to houses of
their own; and I was left, related really to nobody, without property
and without home.

"I