then with a smile half sweet, half bitter,
"I have so much to thank you for, Mrs. Cameron."

"But you are not going already,--just as I enter too. Hold! Mrs. Cameron
tells me you are lodging with my old friend Jones. Come and stop a
couple of days with us: we can find you a room; the room over your
butterfly cage, eh, Fairy?"

"Thank you too. Thank you all. No; I must be in London by the first
train."

Speaking thus, he had found his way to the door, bowed with the quiet
grace that characterized all his movements, and was gone.

"Pardon his abruptness, Lily; he too loves; he too is impatient to
find a betrothed," said the artist gayly: "but now he knows my dearest
secret, I think I have a right to know his; and I will try."

He had scarcely uttered the words before he too had quitted the room and
overtaken Kenelm just at the threshold.

"If you are going back to Cromwell Lodge,--to pack up, I suppose,--let
me walk with you as far as the bridge."

Kenelm inclined his head assentingly and tacitly as they passed through
the garden-gate, winding backwards through the lane which skirted the
garden pales; when, at the very spot in which the day after their first
and only quarrel Lily's face had been seen brightening through the
evergreen, that day on which the old woman, quitting her, said, "God
bless you!" and on which the vicar, walking with Kenelm, spoke of her
fairy charms; well, just in that spot Lily's face appeared again, not
this time brightening through the evergreens, unless the palest gleam
of the palest moon can be said to brighten. Kenelm saw, started, halted.
His companion, then in the rush of a gladsome talk, of which Kenelm had
not heard a word, neither saw nor halted; he walked on mechanically,
gladsome, and talking.

Lily stretched forth her hand through the evergreens. Kenelm took it
reverentially. This time it was not his hand that trembled.

"Good-by," she said in a whisper, "good-by forever in this world. You
understand,--you do understand me. Say that you do."

"I understand. Noble child! noble choice! God bless you! God comfort
me!" murmured Kenelm. Their eyes met. Oh, the sadness; and, alas! oh the
love in the eyes of both!

Kenelm passed on.

All said in an instant. How many Alls are said in an instant! Melville
was in the midst of some glowing sentence, begun when Kenelm dropped
from his side, and the end of the sentence was this:

"Words cannot say how fair seems life; how easy seem