He was waiting for me in the long stoop, leaning against a post, and fanning his manly head with the broad brim of his Panama hat. Oh, how majestic, how--but language fails me here. Arm in arm we walked along the beach. He leaned toward me, I leaned with gentle heaviness on him--delightful reciprocity--eloquent silence. A soft breeze blew up from the ocean, and kissed us both with refreshing softness. "Ah!" said the noble man by my side, "this is delicious." "Deliriously so," I murmured. "You feel the revivifying effect?" says he. "Exquisitely," says I, leaning a little more confidingly on his stalwart arm. He bent his stately head and looked down into my eyes. Sisters, the thrill of that glance shook my delicate frame as bumble-bees set a full-blown rose to trembling when they swarm in its heart. "Shall we go down to the sands?" says he; "the incoming tide is dashing them with coolness." I understood the delicate meaning conveyed in these words. Nothing could be more exquisitely suggestive. The tide--what was that but his own noble self? The sands--pure, white, untrodden--in my whole life I never heard anything more typical. "If you desire it," I said. "If I desire it. Ah! Miss Frost, it is for you to say." My heart leaped to this as a speckled trout snaps at a fly. Nothing so near a proposal had ever reached me before. But a New England woman is modest; she does not snatch at the first offer--far from it. I pretended not to understand the badly hidden meaning of his metaphor. A little art of this kind is feminine and excusable, even in a young girl dignified with Society membership and a mission. I felt that he could appreciate it. He did. Some people were below us on the sands. They paused to look up as this noble creature handed me down those wooden steps. The effect must have been artistical. My cloud-like skirts floated softly on the zephyrs. My scarf streamed out like a banner. I am afraid the curve of my boot might have been seen from below, for many admiring faces were turned that way, and Mr. Burke cast his eye downward in a fugitive manner. At last we reached the sands, on which both the sun and waves were beating luminously. By a ridge of white sand he paused. "Shall we sit here?" says he, with tender questioning. "Anywhere," says I, with sweet feminine complacency. Then I dropped down on the sand ridge, and sweeping my skirts together, cast a timid glance up and around. That noble man was spreading a silk umbrella. There was a hitch in the spring, and, such was his eager impatience to occupy the seat I had so delicately suggested, that a real naughty word broke from his lips--a word I, as a missionary, never could forgive, if it hadn't been the proof of such loving impatience. As it was, like a recording angel, I blotted it out of my memory with a forgiving sigh.