“Please would you walk with me to the railway,” were the words that came from Bessie’s lips at last. She rose up trembling and faint, and with a kind of instinct took Mr Brown’s arm. He, on his part, did not say anything to her. His agitation melted away into a subdued silent tenderness which did not need any expression. He took her back into the streets, all along that tiresome way. He suffered the noise to surround and abstract her without any interruption which would make her conscious of his presence. It was a strange walk for both. To have called them lovers would have been absurd--to have supposed that here was a marriage of convenience about to be arranged would have been more ridiculous still. What was it? Bessie went along the street in a kind of cloud, aware of nothing very clearly; feeling somehow that she leant upon somebody, and that it was somebody upon whom she had a right to lean. They reached the railway thus, without any further explanation. Mr Brown put the trembling girl into a carriage, and did not go with her. The Carlingford attorney had turned into a paladin. Was it possible that his outer man itself had smoothed out and expanded too? “I am not going with you,” he said, grasping her hand closely. “I won’t embarrass or distress you, Bessie; but recollect you have not said no; and when I come to Grove Street to-morrow, I’ll hope to hear you say yes. I’ll let you off,” said John Brown, grasping the little soft hand so tight and hard that it hurt Bessie. “I’ll let you off with liking, if you’ll give me that; at my age I don’t even venture to say for myself that I’m very much in love.” And with that, the eyes, which had betrayed him before, flashed in Bessie’s face a contradiction of her elderly lover’s words. Yes! it astounded himself almost as much as it did Bessie. He would still have flatly contradicted anybody who accused him of that folly; but he went away with an undeniable blush into the London streets, self-convicted. A year’s observation and an hour’s talk had resulted in a much less philosophical sentiment than Mr Brown was prepared for. He went back to the streets, wondering what she would like in all those wonderful shop-windows. He traced back, step for step, the road they had come together. He was not six-and-forty--six-and-twenty was the true reading. That was a May-day of his youth that had come to him, sweet if untimely; a missed May-day, perhaps all the better that it had been kept for him these many tedious years. And though Bessie cried all the way down to Carlingford, the no she had not said did not occur to her as any remedy for her tears; and, indeed, when she remembered how she had taken Mr Brown’s arm, and felt that she had committed herself by that act, the idea was rather a relief to Bessie. “It was as bad as saying yes at once,” said she to herself, with many blushes. But thus, you perceive, it was done, and could not be altered. She must stand to the consequences of her weakness now.