“I must have known you all my life. And I mean to know you all the rest of my life, and a great deal more than that----” “It may be because you are Gregory’s friend you are allowed to do things. But what would you think of me, Mr. Lorraine, if I were to call you ‘Hilary’--a thing I should never even dream of?” “I should think that you were the very kindest darling, and I should ask you to breathe it quite into my ear--‘Hilary, Hilary!’--just like that; and then I should answer just like this, ‘Mabel, Mabel, sweetest Mabel, how I love you, Mabel!’ and then what would you say, if you please?” “I should have to ask my mother,” said the maiden, “what I ought to say. But luckily the whole of this is in your imagination. Mr. Lorraine, you have lost your strawberries by your imagination.” “What do I care for strawberries?” Hilary cried, as the quick girl wisely beat a swift retreat from him. “You never can enter into my feelings, or you never would run away like that. And I can’t run after you, you know, because of Phyllis and Gregory. There she goes, and she won’t come back. What a fool I was to be in such a hurry! But what could I do to help it? I never know where I am when she turns those deep rich eyes upon me. She never will show them again, I suppose, but keep the black lashes over them. And I was getting on so well--and here are the stalks of the strawberries!” Of every strawberry she had eaten from his daring fingers he had kept the stalk and calyx, breathed on by her freshly fragrant breath, and slyly laid them in his pocket; and now he fell to at kissing them. Then he lay down in the Carolinas, where her skirt had moved the leaves; and to him, weary with strong heat, and a rush of new emotions, comfort came in the form of sleep. And when he awoke, in his open palm most delicately laid he found a little shell-shaped cabbage-leaf piled with the fruit of the glossy neck. [1] That admirable writer, Dr. Hogg. CHAPTER XVI. OH, SWEETER THAN THE BERRY! These doings of Hilary and his love--for his love he declared her to be for ever, whether she would have him for hers or not--seem to have taken more time almost in telling than in befalling. Although it had been a long summer’s day, to them it had passed as a rapid dream. So at least they fancied, when they began to look quietly back at it, forgetting the tale of the golden steps so lightly flitted over by the winged feet of love.