She ran down the door steps, and walked quickly through the Crescent. It was a clear, sunshiny, frosty day--such a day as always both cheered and calmed her. She had, despite all her cares, youth, health, energy; and a holy and constant love lay like a sleeping angel in her heart. Must I tell the truth, and own that before she had gone two streets' length Hilary ceased to feel so very, very miserable? Love--this kind of love of which I speak--is a wonderful thing, the most wonderful thing in all the world. The strength it gives, the brightness, the actual happiness, even in hardest times, is often quite miraculous. When Hilary sat waiting in the jeweler's shop, she watched a little episode of high life--two wealthy people choosing their marriage plate; the bride, so careless and haughty; the bridegroom, so unutterably mean to look at, stamped with that innate smallness and coarseness of soul which his fine clothes only made more apparent. And she thought--oh, how fondly she thought!--of that honest, manly mein; of that true, untainted heart, which she felt sure, had never loved any woman but herself; of the warm, firm hand, carving its way thro' the world for her sake, and waiting patiently till it could openly clasp hers, and give her every thing it had won. She would not have exchanged him. Robert Lyon, with his penniless love, his half-hopeless fortunes, or maybe his lot of never ending care, for the "brawest bridegroom" under the sun. Under this sun--the common, everyday winter sun of Regent and Oxford streets--she walked now as brightly and bravely as if there were no trouble before her, no painful meeting with Ascott, no horrid humiliation from which every womanly feeling in her nature shrunk with acute pain. "Robert, my Robert!" she whispered in her heart, and felt him so near to her that she was at rest, she hardly knew why. Possibly grand, or clever, or happy people who condescend to read this story may despise it, think it unideal, uninteresting; treating of small things and common people--"poor persons," in short. I can not help it. I write for the poor; not to excite the compassion of the rich toward them, but to show them their own dignity and the bright side of their poverty. For it has its bright side; and its very darkest, when no sin is mixed up therewith, is brighter than many an outwardly prosperous life. "Better is a dinner of herbs, where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than a house full of sacrifices and strife."