The brilliant evening came to an end, and left three people more happy than words of mine could tell. Lady Hermione, with her lover’s first kiss warm on her lips, his passionate words lingering in her ears, her heart warm with the remembrance of all he had said to her, and how dearly he loved her; Sir Ronald, happy because he believed the bonnie bright bird he had wooed so long would flutter into his hand; Clarice, happy under a false impression, and because she loved Sir Ronald so well that she believed that which she should only have hoped. “I will lose no time,” said Sir Ronald to himself. “To-morrow I will ask her that most honest of all questions: ‘Will you be my wife?’” But Sir Ronald found that to propose and to accomplish a deed was very different. Although he was remaining at Leeholme until evening he found no opportunity of saying one word to Lady Hermione; there were so many guests and her attention was so incessantly occupied. There were always young girls eagerly talking to her, or gentlemen paying her compliments, and, as the daughter of the house, she was engaged in entertaining visitors. In vain Sir Ronald watched and waited. He only asked five minutes, but even that short space of time was quite out of his reach. He sat by her side during lunch, but even the most ardent of lovers could not possibly make an offer of marriage over cold chicken and lobster salad. There was a little assertion of independence, too, on her part. She knew what was coming just as a wild, bright forest bird knows its fate when the net is drawn around it. In vain Sir Ronald spoke to her. The lovely eyes, so frankly raised to other faces, drooped shyly from his. The sweet, proud lips that smiled so freely were mute and closed for him. Maiden modesty and maiden pride rendered her shy, timid and silent with the lover for whom she would have laid down her sweet, young life. Sir Ronald only loved her the better for it; his heart beat with impatience. “Let me have only one minute with her,” he said, “and I would soon change all that.” But Sir Ronald was obliged to leave Leeholme without accomplishing his wish. He rode home through the fragrant gloaming with a heart full of love that was both happiness and pain. “She will be mine,” he said to himself, when any cold or cruel doubts came to him; “she will be mine because she let me kiss her lips, and that kiss was a solemn betrothal.” There came to his mind the words of a beautiful, quaint old German ballad, “Schön Rothant,” wherein a lover says: “Every leaf in the forest knows that I have kissed her lips.” “She will be mine,” he cried aloud. “I would work for her twice seven years, as Jacob did. I would be content to love her my whole life through, satisfied if in death she rewarded me with but one smile. I love her so that if I lay dead with green grass and forest leaves heaped over me and she came to my grave and whispered my name, I should hear her.”