ed round the little man on
her left, upon whom the clerks simultaneously bestowed the appellation
of "feller," and driving him, as being the sharpest and thinnest wedge
at hand, through a dense knot of some half-a-dozen gapers, while,
following his involuntary progress, she looked defiance on the
malcontents, she succeeded in clearing her way to the spot where stood
the young man she had discovered. The ambitious dreamer, for it was
he, thus detected and disturbed, looked embarrassed for a moment as the
stout lady, touching him with the umbrella, said,--

"Well, I declare if this is not too bad! You sent word that you should
not be able to come out with us to see the 'luminations, and here you
are as large as life!"

"I did not think, at the moment you wrote to me, that-"

"Oh, stuff!" interrupted the stout woman, with a significant,
good-humoured shake of her head; "I know what's what. Tell the truth,
and shame the gentleman who objects to showing his feet. You are a wild
fellow, John Ardworth, you are! You like looking after the pretty faces,
you do, you do--ha, ha, ha! very natural! So did you once,--did not you,
Mr. Mivers, did not you, eh? Men must be men,--they always are men, and
it's my belief that men they always will be!"

With this sage conjecture into the future, the lady turned to Mr.
Mivers, who, thus appealed to, extricated with some difficulty his chin
from the folds of his belcher, and putting up his small face, said, in a
small voice, "Yes, I was a wild fellow once; but you have tamed me, you
have, Mrs. M.!"

And therewith the chin sank again into the belcher, and the small voice
died into a small sigh.

The stout lady glanced benignly at her spouse, and then resuming her
address, to which Ardworth listened with a half-frown and a half-smile,
observed encouragingly,--

"Yes, there's nothing like a lawful wife to break a man in, as you
will find some day. Howsomever, your time's not come for the altar, so
suppose you give Helen your arm, and come with us."

"Do," said Helen, in a sweet, coaxing voice.

Ardworth bent down his rough, earnest face to Helen's, and an evident
pleasure relaxed its thoughtful lines. "I cannot resist you," he began,
and then he paused and frowned. "Pish!" he added, "I was talking folly;
but what head would not you turn? Resist you I must, for I am on my way
now to my drudgery. Ask me anything some years hence, when I have time
to be happy, and then see if I am the be