of her being rather more imaged for him, and ever so typically, than likely to be, whatever fulness of reality awaited them, possessed by him; which pair of contradictions, however, melted together in the tide of happy intelligence that next flooded and seemed verily almost to drown them. That he should thus on the instant have clasped to his heart and his lips a young woman with whom in all his life he had never yet exchanged a word settled the relation for each alike as soon as it had been so nobly and freely sketched; which was again a case of that felt security after the fact already noted by him, as we have seen, and scarce open, of a truth, to more vivid illustration. The security was felt just as much by herself: this made the harmony full, this acted to keep it still quite possible for him that the comparatively superficial commerce, the inquiry and explanation that might have figured as preliminary, should follow at a lower level what had just taken place, and do so without either casting absurdity back on the passage or their themselves incurring ridicule. "I reached London but last night--so you see I haven't lost much time. Perhaps I should first have asked your mother's leave," Ralph said; but she had already at the word taken him up. "Oh she would certainly have given it!" And he at once saw from the tone of this that what she referred to as so licensed was the plunge into intimacy just enacted. It put him a trifle out of tune that the most he himself had meant was that he might have inquired of his cousin's convenience as to presenting himself; and to feel his deference to that propriety--or to almost any, it might seem--so swept away reminded him afresh that he couldn't, by every appearance, be too bold, since he plainly created in others, straight off and by his presence, the liveliest dispositions and allowances. If it was true that Mrs. Midmore, as he had figured her, would have smiled upon his silent rush at her daughter from their very threshold, what could this signify but that the house and the whole circle contained a treasure of welcome on which he was infinitely to draw? Well, it was still then in the highest degree agreeable to find everyone so understanding him as to help him to understand himself; no example of which felicity could be greater than such a promise of ease with the lady of Drydown, given the forms of deference he had tried to prepare himself to pay her. "You mustn't speak as if we have been thinking of you in the least as a stranger; for how can that be," Molly asked, "when everything was so made up between us all by your father's writing in that way to mamma so shortly before he died, wasn't it?" Her fine expressive eyes, he at once recognised, were charged with an appeal to him on the ground of this interesting history; and once more, after the merest repeated brush of the wing of that bewilderment by which he was thus effectually admonished and aided to