“‘I am yours. But if you mean when will I marry you, why, whenever you please. We have suffered too cruelly and loved too dearly for me to put you off a single day for affectations and vanities. When you please, my own.’ “At this Henry kissed her little white feet with rapture, and kept kissing them at intervals all the rest of the way; and the horrors of the night ended to these two in unutterable rapture, as they paced slowly along to Woodbine Villa with hearts full of wonder, gratitude, and joy.” These pleasant passages are from Reade’s “Very Hard Cash:” “The young man, ardent as herself, and not, in reality, half so timorous, caught fire, and, seeing a white, eloquent hand rather near him, caught it and pressed his warm lips on it in mute adoration and gratitude. “At this she was scared and offended. ‘Oh, keep that for the queen!’ cried she, turning scarlet and tossing her fair head into the air like a startled stag, and she drew her hand away quickly and decidedly, though not roughly. He stammered a lowly apology. In the very middle of it she said, softly, ‘Good-by, Mr. Hardie,’ and swept with a gracious little courtesy through the door-way, leaving him spell-bound. “And so the virginal instinct of self-defence carried her off swiftly and cleverly. But none too soon; for, on entering the house, that external composure her two mothers, Mesdames Dodd and Nature, had taught her, fell from her like a veil, and she fluttered up the stairs to her own room with hot cheeks, and panted there like some wild thing that has been grasped at and grazed. She felt young Hardie’s lips upon the palm of her hand plainly; they seemed to linger there still,—it was like light but live velvet. This and the ardent look he had poured into her eyes set the young creature quivering. Nobody had looked at her so before, and no young gentleman had imprinted living velvet on her hand. She was alarmed, ashamed, and uneasy. What right had he to look at her like that? What shadow of a right to go and kiss her hand? He could not pretend to think she had put it out to be kissed; ladies put forth the back of the hand for that, not the palm. The truth was, he was an impudent fellow, and she hated him now, and herself too, for being so simple as to let him talk to her. Mamma would not have been so imprudent when she was a girl. “She would not go down, for she felt there must be something of this kind legibly branded on her face: ‘Oh! oh! just look at this young lady! She has been letting a young gentleman kiss the palm of her hand, and the feel has not gone off yet; you may see that by her cheeks.’”