st of our days, take the
poetry out of our lives? I think not; I think Marian must always be to me
what she has seemed to me from the very first--something better and
brighter than the common things of this life."

Custom, which made Marian Nowell dearer to Gilbert Fenton every day, had
by this time familiarised her with his position as her future husband.
She was no longer surprised or distressed when he pleaded for a short
engagement, and a speedy realization of that Utopian home which they were
to inhabit together. The knowledge of her uncle's delight in this
engagement of hers might have reconciled her to it, even if she had not
loved Gilbert Fenton. And she told herself that she did love him; or,
more often putting the matter in the form of a question, asked herself
whether she could be so basely ungrateful as not to love one who regarded
her with such disinterested affection?

It was settled finally, after a good deal of pleasant discussion, that
the wedding should take place early in the coming spring--at latest in
April. Even this seemed a long delay to Gilbert; but he submitted to it
as an inevitable concession to the superior instinct of his betrothed,
which harmonised so well with Mrs. Lister's ideas of wisdom and
propriety. There was the house to be secured, too, so that he might have
a fitting home to which to take his darling when their honeymoon was
over; and as he had no female relation in London who could take the care
of furnishing this earthly paradise off his hands, he felt that the whole
business must devolve upon himself, and could not be done without time.

Captain Sedgewick promised to bring Marian to town for a fortnight in
October, in order that she might assist her lover in that delightful duty
of house-hunting. She looked forward to this visit with quite a childlike
pleasure. Her life at Lidford had been completely happy; but it was a
monotonous kind of happiness; and the notion of going about London, even
at the dullest time of the year, was very delightful to her.

The weather happened to be especially fine that September. It was the
brightest month of the year, and the lovers took long rambles together in
the woodland roads and lanes about Lidford, sometimes alone, more often
with the Captain, who was a very fair pedestrian, in spite of having had
a bullet or two through his legs in the days gone by. When the weather
was too warm for walking, Gilbert borrowed Martin Lister's dog-cart, an