From this somewhat shabby and ragged out-of-door life on the king’s highway, it was a relief for Lucius to enter the calm seclusion of the shadowy old house, where the June sunshine was tempered at midday by half-closed oaken shutters, and where it seemed to the surgeon there was ever a peculiar coolness and freshness, and faint perfume of some simple garden flower unknown elsewhere. In this sultry weather, when the outer world was as one vast oven, that sparsely-furnished parlour with its dark wainscot walls was a place to dream in; the dim old hall with its chaotic treasures saved from the wreck of time, a delicious retreat from the clamour and toil of life. Here Lucius loved to come, and here he was sure of a sweet welcome from her whom he had loved at first sight, and whom familiarity had made daily dearer to him. Yes, he confessed now that the interest he had felt in Lucille Sivewright from the very first had its root in a deeper feeling than compassion. He was no longer ashamed to own that it was love, and love only, that had made yonder rusty iron gate, by which he had so often lingered, sad and longing, seem to him as the door of paradise. One evening, after the old man had taken to his room up-stairs, and Lucille had been sorrowful and anxious, and had seemed in peculiar need of consolation, the old, old story was told once more under the pale stars of evening, as these two wandered about that patch of dusty sward above which the old cedar stretched his shrunken branches, and cast grim shadows on the shadowy grass. The creek with its black barges lay before them; beyond, a forest of roofs, and attic windows, and tall factory chimneys, and distant spars of mighty merchantmen faintly visible against the pale-gray sky. Not a romantic spot, or a scene calculated to inspire the souls of lovers, by any means. Yet Lucius was every whit as eloquent as he would have been had they wandered on the shores of Leman, or watched the sun go down from the orange groves of Cintra. The girl heard him in profound silence. They had come to a pause in their desultory wanderings by the decaying ruin of an ancient summer-house, at an angle of the wall close to the creek—a spot which to the simpler tastes of untravelled citizens in the last century may have seemed eminently picturesque. Lucille sat on the broken bench in a somewhat dejected attitude, her arms resting on a battered old table, her face turned away from Lucius towards the dingy hulls that lay moored upon those muddy waters, unbeautiful as that dark ferry-boat which Dante saw advancing shadowy athwart the ‘woeful tide of Acheron.’ He had spoken earnestly, and had pleaded well, but had been unable to read any answer in those truthful eyes, whose every expression he fancied he knew. Those had been persistently averted from him.