Mrs. Perry stayed in the house to help her sister wash up, and, no doubt, to have a little intimate conversation with her; and Edward went off with apologies, to some engagement in the way of self-improvement. The rest of us adjourned to the park, and when we had seen the children happily amusing themselves in the pony paddocks, where there were hurdles, and a little water-jump, I had the delight, which I had hoped all along might come to me, of wandering alone with Miriam through the bosky shades of that beautiful pleasance. Miriam seemed at first a little nervous, but we soon fell into easy converse, which gradually drifted, with possibly a little urging on my part, into one of a more confidential nature. I will not repeat any of it; perhaps it is not worth repeating. I said things that come easily to the lips of any lover, and she received them with a sweet modesty that made me think them almost inspired. It was a lovely quiet evening; the retired walks in which we strolled amongst the trees and flowers might have been deep in the country, instead of in the heart of a city; and if we met, as we did sometimes, other pairs of lovers, who had fled to these comparative solitudes, they only seemed to justify our own emotional condition. It soon became wooing in dead earnest with me, but I knew that I must not pass a certain point in my declarations until Miriam gave me to understand that I had leave to do so. At last, when once or twice she had turned from me, twisting her handkerchief in her little ungloved hands, and pausing as if about to say something which she could not make up her mind to say, I cried: "Oh, this heavenly garden! I shall never forget walking here with you this evening as long as I live." Then she turned towards me, and smiled and blushed and dropped her eyes again, and said: "Would you like to walk with me in _my_ garden?" At these words I forgot all about Upsidonia, and the possibility of shocking her by accelerating its etiquette. Hang etiquette at so sweet a moment! I took her in my arms and kissed her. And apparently etiquette was the same at this stage in Upsidonia as everywhere else. Or else she forgot all about it too. FOOTNOTES: [28] This park was one of the most beautiful of the many in Culbut, and of something like twenty acres in extent. It was not really a public park, although it was called so, and was kept up with public money. It was used exclusively by the inhabitants of the houses abutting on to it; the Ladies Susan and Cynthia might play all over it without any risk of infection, mental or physical, from rich children; and if Lord and Lady Blueberry took a walk there in the cool of the evening they would meet none but those whom it might be agreeable to them to meet.