that things came to him, everything a right carriage required for the closer personal relation, in the very nick of being wanted, and wore thus, even under the gasp of a slight danger escaped, a certain charm and cheer of suddenness. That he was to make love, by every propriety, to Molly Midmore, and that he had in fact reached his goal on the very wings of that intention, this foretaste as of something rare had for days and days past hung about him like the scent of a flower persisting in life; but the sweetness of his going straight up to her with an offered embrace hadn't really been disclosed till her recognition, as we have said, breathed upon it with force and filled him at once with an extraordinary wealth of confidence. He had stepped straight into that with his stepping into the room, and while he stood but long enough to know himself lifted and carried the taking in of what she was through all his senses completed the splendid rightness. Nothing might have been stranger than so repeated a jump, so flying a leap, to firm ground which hadn't been there before in any measurable manner but which his feet just felt beneath them at the crisis of need. Was it going to be enough simply to do the thing, whatever it might be, for it to "come" right, as they said, and for him above all to like it, as who should also say, after the fact? Surprising perhaps that questions of so comparatively general a kind should press with their air of particular business into an active apprehension unconditioned and absolute enough to forestall any conceivable lapse; yet nothing could well be pleasanter than such a quickening, and this even under the possibility that he might after a little get used to it. The young woman there in her capacious corner was admirably, radiantly handsome, and all the while still kept the posture she had at once risen to--kept it as for fear of his loss of the pleasure by her breaking it ever so little. The case was of course really that a mere moment sufficed for these enormities of attestation; the air roundabout them was prodigiously clean and clear, and so favoured happy certitude that by the time he had advanced a trifle further he was, in addition to everything else we have indicated, aware that, modest as she would indubitably prove, she was neither awkward nor shy, and was in fact quite as inspired and inflamed as himself. She came out from behind her frame, to which she had given a light push, and then it was that her splendid fairness, a complexion white and pink, and that her friendly laughing eyes and full parted lips and thickness of loose brown hair, helped the dress of sprigged muslin which kept as clear of her neck as it did of her elbows to tell him about her, from head to foot--and she was more than middling tall--everything that most pressingly concerned him. There played round him before he took her to his arms the glimmer of a comment kindled at some other flame than that of desire, the wonder