Miss Pilgrim had been trying to find words, but her face was too much for her and she was obliged to seek retirement in her handkerchief. As she drew it from her pocket, a well-worn piece of paper followed it and fell upon the floor. Billy picked it up before she noticed it, and was about to hand it to her, when his jealous eye fell upon a withered rosebud sewed to its margin. As he looked at it, with his little brows knit into a precocious sternness, he recognized his brother's handwriting immediately beneath the flower. It was one of the daily anonymous sonnets, of which Daniel had told me, and the bud a relic of the bouquet accompanying it. Still Daniel was silent. What else could he be? “Very well, very well, Master Daniel!” exclaimed Billy, in a voice trembling with grief and indignation, “there's good enough reason why you won't speak a word for me. You want her yourself--here it is in your own writing. No wonder you won't tell Lottie to be my wife, when you're trying to take her away from me. Oh, Lottie, dear Lottie! I love you just as much as he does, though I don't know everything and can't write you poetry like it was out of the Fifth Reader! Daniel, how could you go and write to my Lottie this way: 'My churner'--no, it isn't churner, it's charmer,--'let me call thee mine'?” Forgetting the sacredness of private MS. in that of private grief, he would have gone on, with a pause here and there for certainty of spelling, to the conclusion of the poem, had not Lottie sprung up, with her imploring face suffused by her discovery, for the first time, of the identity of her secret lover and the escape of his sonnet from her pocket. It was too late! There he stood before her unmistakably proved, and herself unmistakably proving in what estimation she held his verses and bouquets. “Oh Billy, dear Billy! If you do love me, don't do so!” So exclaiming, she held out her hand, and Billy put the MS. into it with all the dignity of a wounded spirit. “Mr. Lovegrove,” said Miss Pilgrim, “I don't know what to say.” “I feel very much that way myself,” said Daniel. “_I_ don't,” said Billy, now in command of his voice. “I'll tell you what it is: perhaps Daniel didn't know how much I wanted you, Lottie--and perhaps he wants you 'most as bad as I do. But whatever way it is, I want you to choose between us, fair and square, and no dodging. Come now! You can take just whichever one of us you please, and the other won't lay up any grudge, though I know if that's me, or like me, he'll feel awful. You can have till to-morrow morning to make up your mind between me and Daniel, and if he won't say anything about it to pa and ma till then, I won't. Good-by, _dear_ Lottie!”