ll be back soon. Will you wait for
her?"

"I do not know whether I am not glad that she should be out. Florence, I
have something that I must tell you."

"Something that you must tell me!"

He had called her Florence once before, on a happy afternoon which he
well remembered, but he was not thinking of that now. Her name, which
was always in his mind, had come to him naturally, as though he had no
time to pick and choose about names in the importance of the
communication which he had to make. "Yes. I don't believe that you were
ever really engaged to your cousin Mountjoy."

"No, I never was," she answered, briskly. Harry Annesley was certainly a
handsome man, but no young man living ever thought less of his own
beauty. He had fair, wavy hair, which he was always submitting to some
barber, very much to the unexpressed disgust of poor Florence; because
to her eyes the longer the hair grew the more beautiful was the wearer
of it. His forehead, and eyes, and nose were all perfect in their form--

"Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself;
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command."

There was a peculiar brightness in his eye, which would have seemed to
denote something absolutely great in his character had it not been for
the wavering indecision of his mouth. There was as it were a vacillation
in his lips which took away from the manliness of his physiognomy.
Florence, who regarded his face as almost divine, was yet conscious of
some weakness about his mouth which she did not know how to interpret.
But yet, without knowing why it was so, she was accustomed to expect
from him doubtful words, half expressed words, which would not declare
to her his perfected thoughts--as she would have them declared. He was
six feet high, but neither broad nor narrow, nor fat nor thin, but a
very Apollo in Florence's eye. To the elders who knew him the
quintessence of his beauty lay in the fact that he was altogether
unconscious of it. He was a man who counted nothing on his personal
appearance for the performance of those deeds which he was most anxious
to achieve. The one achievement now essentially necessary to his
happiness was the possession of Florence Mountjoy; but it certainly
never occurred to him that he was more likely to obtain this because he
was six feet high, or because his hair waved becomingly.

"I have supposed so," he said, in answer to her last assertion.

"You ought to have known it for certain. I mean to