good large yellow sunflower."

Here was a pretty beginning!

"Miss Brentwood, don't laugh at me, but listen to me a moment. I love
you above all earthly things besides. I worship the ground you walk on.
I loved you from the first moment I saw you. I shall love you as well,
ay, better, if that could be, on the day my heart is still, and my hand
is cold for ever: can you tell me to hope? Don't drive me, by one hasty
half-considered word, to despair and misery for the rest of my life.
Say only one syllable of encouragement, and I will bide your time for
years and years."

Alice was shocked and stunned. She saw he was in earnest, by his looks,
and by his hurried, confused way of speaking. She feared she might have
been to blame, and have encouraged him in her thoughtlessness, more
than she ought. "I will make him angry with me," she said to herself.
"I will treat him to ridicule. It is the only chance, poor fellow!"

"Mr. Mayford," she said, "if I thought you were in jest, I should feel
it necessary to tell my father and brother that you had been
impertinent. I can only believe that you are in earnest, and I deeply
regret that your personal vanity should have urged you to take such an
unwarrantable liberty with a girl you have not yet known for ten days."

He turned and left her without a word, and she remained standing where
she was, half inclined to cry, and wondering if she had acted right on
the spur of the moment--sometimes half inclined to believe that she had
been unladylike and rude. When a thing of this kind takes place, both
parties generally put themselves in immediate correspondence with a
confidant. Miss Smith totters into the apartments of her dearest
friend, and falls weeping on the sofa, while Jones rushes madly into
Brown's rooms in the Temple, and, shying his best hat into the
coalscuttle, announces that there is nothing now left for him but to
drown the past in debauchery. Whereupon Brown, if he is a good fellow,
as all the Browns are, produces the whisky and hears all about it.

So in the present instance two people were informed of what had taken
place before they went to bed that night; and those two were Jim and
Doctor Mulhaus. Alice had stood where Cecil had left her, thinking,
could she confide it to Mrs. Buckley, and ask for advice. But Mrs.
Buckley had been a little cross to her that week for some reason, and
so she was afraid; and, not knowing anybody else well enough, began to
cry.

Ther