How beautiful was their blossoming love-dream! No doubt, after Thomas crept down to the servants' quarters to bed and the hall was deserted, they often stole away from the company, opened the massive mahogany door, and gazed off over the patch of garden into the night. Only the garden knew of their first kisses,--the nesting birds and the drowsy flowers. They always seem to keep an eye open for human lovers. The robins and the bluebirds chirp sadly, and the flowers give forth fragrant sighs just as if they knew that the course of "true love never runs smooth." Under the little beech-tree, with his arm about her, he told her of the humble home he hoped to rent in Gansevoort Street when she would say "Yes." He would not be dependent on his father. His office down on Nassau Street was no longer always deserted. "I will bring mammy from the country," she would whisper. "And Ned." "Yes, dear," he would answer. "I shall cook the breakfast for you with my own hands every morning." Little white hands. How he pressed them! "Isn't it beautiful just to be here together?" her lips would falter, as if afraid of the words. Poor little old-time lovers! Poor little fluttering hearts! There are steps on the pavement outside the gates, for the watch have started on the weary walk with night. The Moore girls who decorously occupied the Orleans sofas all through the calling hours soon began to notice the couple who so often left the circle. In the morning at the breakfast-table there were often sly innuendoes that Dr. Moore, absorbed in his _Herald_, never paid any attention to and Mrs. Moore could not understand. She would have, though, if she had observed the burning roses in a maiden's cheeks and the angry eyes of the youth opposite glaring at his tormentors. "Oh, girls, did you observe the new moon last night?" Jane Moore would innocently ask. "Ellen, you must have." Then how they would giggle. "Hush, girls!" Mrs. Moore would say as she poised her Wedgwood coffee-cup and gazed around the table. "Young ladies in your station of life should never laugh so loudly; it is not genteel." Some of the young fellows who called at the house were not so observing as the Moore girls. Freddy Frelinghuysen used to try and keep the pretty country cousin by his side on one of the sofas when the sparking hour was on. Captain William Montgomery, just home from the West Indies, professed open admiration for a New York maiden who could spin. "If you will spin me a shirt in an afternoon like the girls in Melrose used to make I will give you the handsomest lace dress to be found in the city," he once said. "Agreed," she answered. "And if I fail I will give you the finest dress suit a tailor can make." You may be sure that the proud sister-in-law of a bishop never heard of this wager. The girls kept it a secret. "It is not anything, after all," Jane said to her sisters. "Ellen not being town bred, it will exonerate her."