"Oh, those squares! those grave old Bloomsbury squares, with their formal rows of windows, and monotonous iron railings, and stately doorways, and clean doorsteps, and enclosures of trees, whose blackened branches showed leafless against the steely sky of a frosty evening! What groves or streams of paradise could be fairer to us two than the dull pavements which we paced arm-in-arm in the wintry greyness, telling each other those thoughts and fancies which seemed in their intuitive sympathy to mark us for predestined life-companions. Her thoughts were childishly expressed sometimes; but it seemed to me always as if they were only my thoughts in a feminine guise. Nothing that she said ever jarred upon me; and her ignorance of the world and all its ways suggested some nymph or fairy reared in the seclusion of woodland or ocean cave. I thought of Endymion, and I fancied that his goddess could have been scarcely less of the earth than this fair girl who walked beside me, confiding in me with a childlike faith. "One night I told her that I loved her. We had stayed out later than usual. The clock of St. George's Church was striking nine, and in the shadowy quiet of Queen's Square my lips met hers in love's first kiss. How shyly and how falteringly she confessed her own secret, so carefully guarded till that moment. "'I never thought you could care for a poor girl like me,' she said; 'but I loved you from the first. Yes, almost from the very first. My heart seemed frozen after my father's death, and your voice was the first that thawed it. The dull, benumbed feeling passed away, and I knew that I had some one living to love and care for and think about as I sat alone. I had a world of new thoughts to interweave with the music I love.' "'Ah, that music, Esperanza! I am almost jealous of music when I see you so moved and influenced by it.' "'Music would have been my only consolation if you had not cared for me,' she answered simply. "'But I do care for you, and I want you to be my wife, now at once--as soon as we can be married.' "I talked about an immediate marriage before the registrar. But, willing as she was to be guided by me in most things, she would not consent to this. "'It would not seem like marriage to me,' she said, "if we did not stand before the altar.' "'Well, it shall be in a church, then; only we shall have to wait longer. And I must go back to Cambridge at the end of this week. I must get an exeat, and come up to London on our wedding-day, and take you home in the evening. I shall have a quiet home ready for my darling, far from the ken of dons and undergraduates, but within an easy distance of the 'Varsity.' "I explained to her that our marriage must be a secret till I came of age next year, or till I could find a favourable opportunity of breaking the fact to my mother.' "'Will she mind? Will she be angry?' asked Esperanza. "'Not when she comes to know you, dear love.'