“Oh, hush! What has poor Major Railton to do with it?” she said. She was leaning against a lime-tree, a spot which she always remembered. It was cold, but neither of them felt it. Nelly’s little toes were half frozen, and she did not mind. “Look! all the sunset is dying away,” said Molyneux. “It would not go, Nelly, till it knew how things were going to turn out. ‘Go not, happy day, from the shining fields----’” “Don’t talk nonsense--you should say, from the sodden lawn,” said Nelly. “Let us get the primroses now, or what can I say to mamma?” “We shall both have a great deal to say to her. She will never once think of the primroses, Nelly.” “Oh, don’t call me ‘Nelly’ so loud; some one will hear you. Must we go and tell directly?” said the girl, with a half-whimper, which the foolish young man thought celestial. This to be said by Nelly, a girl who had never in all her life kept a secret half an hour from her mother! The fact was that she wanted to have the telling herself, and quaked at the thought of presenting this ardent personage to her mother, and probably having her dignity compromised before that mother’s very eyes by “some of his nonsense.” Nelly was very shy, and half ashamed of coming into the light and looking even her wooer himself in the face. There were but a very few primroses, and these were half frozen, cowering among their leaves. Young Molyneux carried away a little cluster of them, and gave another to Nelly, which was not placed in her basket, and then they made another final round of the garden, and walked down the elm-tree avenue solemnly arm in arm. How quickly the mind gets accustomed to any revolution! This little concluding processional march threw them years in advance of the more agitating contiguity of the Lady’s Walk. “This is how we shall walk about everywhere ten years hence, when we are sober old married people,” he said; and there glanced over the imaginations of both a sudden picture, which both would have been sadly disconcerted to have described. A little tremulous laugh went from one to the other. How much emotion that cannot express itself otherwise has vent in such soft laughter? And a sense of the calm of happiness to come, so different from this delightful dream of the beginning, yet issuing naturally from it, stole over them and stilled their young hearts. This was what was going on in the garden while Major Railton, not without many a horrible thought of his rival’s advantages, was talking bricks and slates, as Molyneux flippantly said, to Mrs. Eastwood. They had come to the length of a pipe and water-butt for the rain-water, and the plumber’s estimate, when Nelly and Molyneux were gathering the primroses. How the gallant Major’s heart was being torn asunder in the midst of those discussions, I dare not attempt to describe. He had seated himself so that he could see into the garden; but the flicker of the firelight filled the room, and the Lady’s Walk was invisible from the windows.