He drew her face down to his, kissed her almost affectionately and then marched out of the door, feeling, as he afterward told me, as if he had blackened his boots all for nothing. Ah me! my dear Billy, how many times we do that in this world! Of what followed when Daniel and Miss Pilgrim were left alone, I have never had full details. But I do know that the young lady obeyed Billy and made her choice. Six months after that both my nephews stood up in Mrs. Rumbullion's parlor to take their several shares in a ceremony in which Miss Pilgrim was the central figure when it began, and Mrs. Daniel Lovegrove when it concluded. Time and elasticity of boyhood had so closed the sharp but evanescent wound in Billy's heart that he could stand the trial of being groomsman where he had wanted to be groom--more especially since he was supported through the emergency by a little sister of Lottie's who promised to be wondrously like her by the time Billy could stand up in the more enviable capacity. Neither Daniel nor Lottie would listen to any objection to such a groomsman on the score of his extreme youth, for, as they said, Billy had been quite as instrumental in bringing them together as any agent, save the Divinity shaping the ends and tying all the knots in which there are heartstrings concerned, as well as white ribbon. Since then Lu has stopped wishing that Billy were like Daniel, for she says that if he had been, there would never have been any Mrs. Daniel Lovegrove in the world. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Brace Of Boys, by Fitz Hugh Ludlow