“You are twenty, I am nineteen; that’s all the difference, though I confess that you have badgered, and scolded, and lectured me enough for forty grandmothers,” he said; “but there’s the stage, and now it’s really good-by.” Two minutes more and I was walking back alone through the quiet shady lane, where Tom and I had played together so often, and where now were the remains of a playhouse he had built under a spreading oak. There was his room, divided from mine by a line of stones, and there in the wall the little niche where I kept my dishes and hid the gooseberry tarts away from greedy Tom. How happy we had been together, making believe sometimes that I was his mother and he my sick baby, which I tried to rock to sleep in my lap, finding his long legs a great inconvenience and a serious obstacle to much petting on my part. Again he was a fierce knight and I a lorn maiden shut up in some grim fortress—usually old Dunluce Castle—for we had once visited the north of Ireland and explored the ruins of what some writer terms “the grandest, romantickest, awfullest sea-king’s home in all the broad kingdom.” We had had our quarrels, too, and even fights, in which I always came off victor, owing to my peculiar mode of warfare, as I had a habit of springing upon him like a little cat and tearing his face with my nails, while he was usually content with jerky pulls at my hair. But all that was over now, and buried with the doll whose head he had broken because I would not stay home and nurse him when he had the quinsy, and could only talk in a wheezy kind of way. He had threatened revenge, and taken it upon my prettiest Paris doll, and I had flown at him like a tiger and scratched his nose till it bled, and cried myself sick, and then we had made it up and buried dolly near the old playhouse in the lane, and reared a slab to her memory, and planted some daisies on her grave. And just here, near what seemed to be the grave of my childhood, I sat down that summer afternoon and thought of all those years—of Tom on his way to India, and of the future opening so brightly before me, for I was the betrothed wife of Archibald Browning, who belonged to one of the best families in the county, and in less than a month we were to be married and spend our honeymoon in Switzerland, among the glorious Alps, of which I had dreamed so much. I knew that Archie’s mother was very proud, and thought her son might have looked higher than Norah Burton, especially as there was a possible peerage in prospect, but she was civil to me, and had said that a season in London would improve me greatly, if such a little creature could be improved; and Archie, I was sure, loved me dearly, notwithstanding that he sometimes criticised my style and manner, and wished I was more like his cousin, Lady Darinda Cleaver, who, I heard, powdered her face and penciled her eyebrows, and was the finest rider on Rotten Row. Tom, who had been often in London, had seen the Lady