It is ten minutes past the due time now. Again I listen intently, as I listened yesterday, for his coming. There is a sound now; but, alas! not the right one! It is the rumbling of an approaching carriage. A pony-chaise bowls past. The occupants are acquaintances of mine, and we bow and smile to each other. As long as they are in sight, I affect to be diligently botanizing in the hedge. When they have disappeared, I sit down on a heap of stones, and take out my watch for the hundredth time; a whole quarter of an hour! "He does not relish the notion of his wife's tramping up and down this muddy road by herself, does not he?" say I, speaking out loud, and gnashing my teeth. Then I hurl my little posy away from me into the mud, as far as it will go. What has become of my patience? my sunny mildness? Then, as the recollection of the velvet-gown and mob-cap episode recurs to me, I repent me, and, crossing the road, pick up again my harmless catkins and snow-drops, and rearrange them. I have hardly finished wiping the mire from the tender, lilac-veined snow-drop petals, before I hear his voice in the distance, in conversation with some one. Clearly, Delilah is coming to see the last of him! I expect that she mostly escorts them to the gate. In my present frame of mind, it would be physically impossible for me to salute her with the bland civility which society enjoins on people of our stage of civilization. I therefore remain sitting on my heap. Presently, Roger emerges alone. He does not see me at first, but looks up the road, and down the road, in search of me. When, at last, he perceives me, no smile--(as has ever hitherto been his wont)--kindles his eyes and lips. With unstirred gravity, he approaches me. "Here you are _at last_!" cry I, scampering to meet him, but with a stress, from which human nature is unable to refrain, on the last two words. "At last?" he repeats in a tone of surprise; "am I over time?--Yes"--(looking at his watch)--"so I am! I had no idea of it; I hope you have not been long waiting." "_I_ was here to the minute," reply I, curtly; and again my tongue declines to refrain from accentuation. "I beg your pardon!" he says, still speaking with unnecessary seriousness, as it seems to me, "I really had no idea of it." "I dare say not," say I, with a little wintry grin; "I never heard that they had a clock in paradise." "_In paradise!_" he repeats, looking at me strangely with his keen, clear eyes, that seem to me to have less of a caress in them than they ever had before on meeting mine. "What has _paradise_ to say to it? Do you imagine that I have been in _paradise_ since I left you here?"