Jack entered the avenue that evening in a frame of mind very different from his feelings on his last recorded visit to Swayne’s cottage. He had been sitting with Pamela all the evening. Mrs. Preston had retired up stairs with her headache, and, with an amount of good sense for which Jack respected her, did not come down again; and the young fellow sat with Pamela, and the minutes flew on angels’ wings. When he came away his feelings were as different as can be conceived from those with which he marched home, resolute but rueful, after his first interview with Mrs. Preston. Pamela and her mother were two very different things--the one was duty, and had to be got through with; but the other--Jack went slowly, and took a little notice of the stars, and felt that the evening air was very sweet. He had put his hands lightly in his pockets, not thrust down with savage force to the depths of those receptacles; and there was a kind of half smile, the reflection of a smile, about his mouth. Fumes were hanging about the youth of that intoxication which is of all kinds of intoxication the most ethereal. He was softly dazzled and bewildered by a subdued sweetness in the air, and in the trees, and in the sky--something that was nothing perceptible, and yet that kept breathing round him a new influence in the air. This was the sort of way in which his evenings, perhaps, were always to be spent. It gave a different view altogether of the subject from that which was in Jack’s mind on the first dawning of the new life before him. Then he had been able to realize that it would make a wonderful difference in all his plans and prospects, and even in his comforts. Now, the difference looked all the other way. Yes, it would indeed be a difference! To go in every night, not to Brownlows with his father’s intermitting talk and Sara’s “tantrums” (this was his brotherly way of putting it), and the monotony of a grave long established wealthy existence, but into a poor little house full of novelty and freshness, and quaint poverty, and amusing straits, and--Pamela. To be sure that last was the great point. They had been speculating about this wonderful new little house, as was natural, and she had laughed till the tears glistened in her pretty eyes at thought of all the mistakes she would make--celestial blunders, which even to Jack, sensible as he was, looked (to-night) as if they must be pleasanter and better and every way more fitting than the wisest actions of the other people. In this kind of sweet insanity the young fellow had left his little love. Life somehow seemed to have taken a different aspect to him since that other evening. No doubt it was a serious business; but then when there are two young creatures, you understand, setting out together, and a hundred chances before them, such as nobody could divine--one to help the other if either should stumble, and two to laugh over every thing, and a hundred devices to be contrived, and