"I see it is to be, Leslie. May it be for your welfare, my dear;" and
her mother stooped abruptly, and kissed the young, averted cheek.

Leslie was awed. She dreaded that her father would be equally moved,
and then she did not know how she could stand it. But she might have
spared herself the apprehension; for when the Professor shuffled in he
sat down as usual, fumbled for his spectacles, looked round with the
most unconscious eye, observed that "Ware" had that day exceeded in his
lecture by twenty minutes--"a bad practice," (Dr. Bower was himself
notoriously unpunctual,) and took not the slightest notice of any event
of greater importance, until Leslie's suspense had been so long on the
rack that it began to subside into dismay, when glancing up for a
moment, he observed parenthetically, as he turned a page--"Child! you
have my approval of a union with Hector Garret--an odd fancy, but that
is no business of ours,"--dropped his eyes again on his volume, and made
no further allusion to the subject for the rest of the evening--no, nor
ever again, of his own free will. Hector Garret assailed him on
preliminaries, his wife patiently waylaid and besieged him for the
necessary funds, acquaintances congratulated him--he was by compulsion
drawn more than once from roots and aesthetics; but left to himself, he
would have assuredly forgotten his daughter's wedding-day, as he had
done that of her baptism.

Leslie recovered from the stunning suddenness of her fate, and awoke
fully to its brightness. To go down to Ayrshire and dwell there among
hills and streams, and pure heather-scented air, like any shepherdess;
to be the nearest and dearest to Hector Garret:--already the
imaginative, warm-hearted girl began to raise him into a divinity.

Leslie was supremely content, she was gay and giddy even with present
excitement; with the pretty bustle of being so important and so
occupied--she whose whole time lately had been vacant and idle--so
willing to admire her new possessions, so openly elated with their
superiority, and not insensible to the fact that all these prominent
obtrusive cares were but little superfluous notes of the great symphony
upon which she had entered, and whose infinitely deeper, fuller, higher
tones she would learn well, by-and-by.

Leslie Bower was the personification of joy, and no one meddled with her
visions. Hector Garret was making his preparations at Otter; and when
Leslie sang as she stitched, and ra