he parlour
with, perhaps, more clemency than a mere pardon required. "By George!
how well she looked with her hair all loose," he said to himself, as
he at last regained his pillow, still warm with the generous god.
But now, as he thought of that night, returning on his road from
Allington to Guestwick, those loose, floating locks were remembered
by him with no strong feeling as to their charms. And he thought also
of Lily Dale, as she was when he had said farewell to her on that day
before he first went up to London. "I shall care more about seeing
you than anybody," he had said; and he had often thought of the words
since, wondering whether she had understood them as meaning more
than an assurance of ordinary friendship. And he remembered well the
dress she had then worn. It was an old brown merino, which he had
known before, and which, in truth, had nothing in it to recommend it
specially to a lover's notice. "Horrid old thing!" had been Lily's
own verdict respecting the frock, even before that day. But she
had hallowed it in his eyes, and he would have been only too happy
to have worn a shred of it near his heart, as a talisman. How
wonderful in its nature is that passion of which men speak when they
acknowledge to themselves that they are in love. Of all things, it
is, under one condition, the most foul, and under another, the most
fair. As that condition is, a man shows himself either as a beast
or as a god! And so we will let poor Johnny Eames ride back to
Guestwick, suffering much in that he had loved basely--and suffering
much, also, in that he had loved nobly.

Lily, as she had tripped along through the shrubbery, under her
lover's arm, looking up, every other moment, into his face, had
espied her uncle and Bernard. "Stop," she had said, giving him a
little pull at the arm; "I won't go on. Uncle is always teasing me
with some old-fashioned wit. And I've had quite enough of you to-day,
sir. Mind you come over to-morrow before you go to your shooting."
And so she had left him.

We may as well learn here what was the question in dispute between
the uncle and cousin, as they were walking there on the broad gravel
path behind the Great House. "Bernard," the old man had said, "I wish
this matter could be settled between you and Bell."

"Is there any hurry about it, sir?"

"Yes, there is hurry; or, rather, as I hate hurry in all things, I
would say that there is ground for despatch. Mind, I do not wish to
drive