They talk much of the future, after the manner of lovers. Although they were so completely happy in each other’s company, and in that calm security which blesses innocent reciprocal love, this little spot of time, the present, counted for nothing in their scheme of life. It may be said that they were happy without being aware of their happiness. And this is true of many lives. The one happy hour in the long dull life slips by unnoted, like water-drops running between one’s fingers. And then years after—when, remembering that brief glimpse of paradise, we look back and would fain return to that green spot beside life’s long dusty beaten turnpike-road—the grass is withered, or the Commons Enclosure Act has swallowed up our pleasant resting-place: or where Poetry’s fairy palace shone radiant in youth’s morning sunlight, there is now only the cold marble of a Tomb. Lucius and Lucille talked of their future—the fame that he was to win, the good that he was to do; noble schemes for the welfare of others, to be realised when fame and wealth were gained; cottage hospitals in pleasant suburban spots, near enough at hand for the sick or worn-out Londoner, and yet with green fields and old trees and song birds about them; chosen retreats where the country yet lingered; little bits of rustic landscape over which the enterprising builder had not yet spread his lime-whitened paw; meadows whose hawthorn hedges were undefiled by smoke, across whose buttercups and crimson sorrel-flowers no speculative eye had yet ranged with a view to ground rents. The young surgeon had various schemes for the improvement of his fellow-creatures’ condition—some wholly philanthropic, others scientific. To all Lucille listened with the same eager interest, worshipping him in her loving womanly way, as if he had been as wise as Socrates. After that first confession of her love, wrung from unwilling lips, there had been no more reserve. She made no mystery of her affection, which was childlike in its simple reverence for those lofty qualities that women are apt to perceive in the object of their regard some time before the rest of the world has awakened to a sense thereof. But she held firmly by the condition which she had imposed on her lover. She would never be his wife, she would begin no new stage of existence, until the mystery of her father’s fate had been solved.