“I ken very weel what I would do,” said Katrin, with a toss of her head. These were the comments below stairs. But when May came and went, and it was not till early June that Lily received her husband, the fever of expectation and anxiety which consumed her was beyond expression. She met him at the head of the spiral stair as usual, but speechless, without a word to say to him. Her cheeks flamed with the heat of her hopes, her terrors, her wild uncertainty. She held out her hands in welcome with something interrogative, enquiring, in them. She did not wish to be taken to his heart, to be kept by any caress from seeing his face and reading what was in it. Was it possible that it was not Ronald at all she was thinking of, but something else--not her husband’s visit, his presence, his love, and the delight of seeing him? And how common, how trivial, how paltry a thing it was which Lily was thinking of first, before even Ronald! Had he found the little house? Had he got it, that hope of her life? was it some business connected with that that had detained him? Had he got the key of it, something resembling the key of it, to lay at her feet, to place in her hand, the charter of her rights and her freedom? But he did not say a word. Was it natural he should when he had just arrived, barely arrived, and was thinking of nothing but his Lily? It was his love that was in his mind, not any secondary thing such as filled hers. He led her in, with his arms around her and joy on his lips. His bonnie Lily! if she but knew how he had been longing for a sight of her, how he had been stopped when he was on the road, how every exasperating thing had happened to hold him back! Ah, she said to herself, it would be the landlord worrying for more money, or some other wicked thing. “But now,” cried Ronald, “the first look of my Lily pays for all!” That was how it was natural he should speak. She supported it all, though her bosom was like to burst. She would not forestall him in his story of how he had secured it, nor yet chill him by showing him that while the first thought in his mind was love, the first in hers was the little house. Oh, no, she would respond, as, indeed, her heart did; but she was choked in her utterance, and could speak few words. If he would only say a word of that, only once: “I have got it, I have got it!” then the floodgates would have been opened, and Lily’s soul would have been free.