ear
Joe, you shall find that you have done so; for I will be, not only
now, when we are young and full of hope, but when we have grown old and
weary, your patient, gentle, never-tiring wife. I will never know a wish
or care beyond our home and you, and I will always study how to please
you with my best affection and my most devoted love. I will: indeed I
will!'

Joe could only repeat his former eloquence--but it was very much to the
purpose.

'They know of this, at home,' said Dolly. 'For your sake, I would leave
even them; but they know it, and are glad of it, and are as proud of you
as I am, and as full of gratitude.--You'll not come and see me as a poor
friend who knew me when I was a girl, will you, dear Joe?'

Well, well! It don't matter what Joe said in answer, but he said a great
deal; and Dolly said a great deal too: and he folded Dolly in his one
arm pretty tight, considering that it was but one; and Dolly made no
resistance: and if ever two people were happy in this world--which is
not an utterly miserable one, with all its faults--we may, with some
appearance of certainty, conclude that they were.

To say that during these proceedings Mr Willet the elder underwent
the greatest emotions of astonishment of which our common nature is
susceptible--to say that he was in a perfect paralysis of surprise, and
that he wandered into the most stupendous and theretofore unattainable
heights of complicated amazement--would be to shadow forth his state of
mind in the feeblest and lamest terms. If a roc, an eagle, a griffin, a
flying elephant, a winged sea-horse, had suddenly appeared, and, taking
him on its back, carried him bodily into the heart of the 'Salwanners,'
it would have been to him as an everyday occurrence, in comparison with
what he now beheld. To be sitting quietly by, seeing and hearing these
things; to be completely overlooked, unnoticed, and disregarded,
while his son and a young lady were talking to each other in the most
impassioned manner, kissing each other, and making themselves in
all respects perfectly at home; was a position so tremendous, so
inexplicable, so utterly beyond the widest range of his capacity of
comprehension, that he fell into a lethargy of wonder, and could no more
rouse himself than an enchanted sleeper in the first year of his fairy
lease, a century long.

'Father,' said Joe, presenting Dolly. 'You know who this is?'

Mr Willet looked first at her, then at his son, then bac