"Not a syllable about it; only mentioned a milestone, and one might have
found a market-woman sitting on that."

"Hallo! here's something feminine. Oh, good gracious! this can't be it,
it's got a brown stuff dress on, and a poke straw bonnet and a green
veil. No, no, Belle. If you married her, that _would_ be a case of
chloroform."

But the horrible brown stuff came sidling along the road with that
peculiar step belonging to ladies of a certain age, characterized by
Patty Greene as "tipputting," sweeping up the dust with its horrible
folds, making straight _en route_ for Belle, who was standing a little
in advance of us. Nineteen! Good Heavens! she must have been fifty if
she was a day, and under her green veil was a chestnut front--yes,
decidedly a front--and a face yellow as a Canadian's, and wrinkled as
Madame Pipelet's, made infinitely worse by that sweet maiden simper and
assumed juvenility common to _vieilles filles_. Up she came towards poor
Belle, who involuntarily retreated step by step till he had backed
against the milestone, and could get no farther, while she smiled up in
his handsome face, and he stared down in her withered one, with the most
comical expression of surprise, dismay, and horror that had ever
appeared on our "beauty's" impassive features.

"Are you--the--the--L. C.?" demanded the maiden of ten lustres, casting
her eyes to the ground with virgin modesty.

"L. C. ar----My dear madam, I don't quite understand you," faltered
Belle, taken aback for once in his life.

"Was it not you," faltered the fair one, shaking out a
pocket-handkerchief that sent a horrible odor of musk to the olfactory
nerves of poor Belle, most fastidious connoisseur in perfume, "who
advertised for a kindred heart and sympathetic soul?"

"Really, my good lady," began Belle, still too aghast by the chestnut
front to recover his self-possession.

"Because," simpered his inamorata, too agitated by her own feelings to
hear his horrible appellative, keeping him at bay there with the fatal
milestone behind him and the awful brown stuff in front of him--"because
I, too, have desired to meet with some elective affinity, some
spirit-tie that might give me all those more subtle sympathies which can
never be found in the din and bustle of the heartless world; I, too,
have pined for the objects of your search--love and domestic happiness.
Oh, blessed words, surely we might--might we not?----"

She paused, overcome with maidenly