No, not quite! There is a step on the path behind her that she knows;
there is an arm round her waist which was never there before, and yet
she starts not as a low voice in her ear says,--

"Alice, my love, my darling, I have come after you to tell you that you
are dearer to me than my life, and all the world besides. Can you love
me half as well as I love you? Alice, will you be my wife?"

What answer? Her hands pressed to her face, with

flood of happy tears, she only says,--

"Oh! I'm so happy, Sam! So glad, so glad!"

Pipe up there, golden-voiced magpie; give us one song more before you
go to roost. Laugh out, old jackass; till you fetch an echo back from
the foggy hollow. Up on your bare boughs, it is dripping, dreary
autumn: but down here in the vineyard, are bursting the first green
buds of an immortal spring.

There are some scenes which should only be undertaken by the hand of a
master, and which, attempted by an apprentice like myself, would only
end in disastrous failure, calling down the wrath of all honest men and
true critics upon my devoted head,--not undeservedly. Three men in a
century, or thereabouts, could write with sufficient delicacy, and
purity to tell you what two such young lovers as Sam Buckley and Alice
Brentwood said to one another in the garden that evening, walking up
and down between the yellow vines. I am not one of those three. Where
Charles Dickens has failed, I may be excused from being diffident. I am
an old bachelor, too--a further excuse. But no one can prevent my
guessing, and I guess accordingly,--that they talked in a very low
tone, and when, after an hour, Alice said it was time to come in, that
Sam was quite astonished to find how little had been said, and what
very long pauses there had been.

They came in through the window into the sittingroom, and there was Dr.
Mulhaus, Captain Brentwood, and also, of all people, Major Buckley,
whom the other two had picked up in their ride and brought home. My
information about this period of my history is very full and complete.
It has come to my knowledge on the best authority, that when Sam came
forward to the light, Halbert kicked Jim's shins under the table, and
whispered, "You have lost your money, old fellow!" and that Jim
answered, "I wish it was ten pounds instead of five."

But old folks are astonishingly obtuse. Neither of the three seniors
saw what had happened; but entered CON AMORE into the proposed
expedition to