lief was overwhelming. He had thought
of a beautiful thing ruined; he had foreshadowed glooms and tragic
colloquies; he had desperately hoped his devotion might be granted at
least the virtue of a balm. Instead, he found this ivory girl, this
loveliness of rose and coral within his arms. So many times she had
eluded him in dreams upon the midway of the night, and so often in
dreams he had held her for kisses that were robbed from him by the
sunlight of the morning, that he scarcely could believe he held her
now, now when her hair was thistledown upon his cheeks, when her mouth
was a butterfly. He shuddered to think how soon this airy beauty must
have perished; and even now what was she? A shred of goldleaf on his
open hand, pliant, but fugitive at a breath, and destructible in a
moment of adversity.

Always in their youth, when they had sat imparadised, Michael had been
aware of the vulgar Haden household in the background. Now, here she was
placed in exactly the room where he would have wished to find her,
though he would scarcely desire to maintain her in such a setting. He
could picture her at not so distant a time in wonderful rooms, about
whose slim furniture she would move in delicate and languorous
promenades. This room pleased him, because it was the one from which he
would have wished to take her into the misty grandeurs he imagined for
her lodging. It was a room he would always regard with affection,
thinking of the canary in the brass cage and the Christmas roses blowing
in the garden and the low sounds of Mrs. Gainsborough busy in her
kitchen underneath. Tinderbox Lane! It was an epithalamium in itself;
and as for Mulberry Cottage, it had been carried here by the fat pink
loves painted on the ceiling of that Cremorne arbor in which the Captain
had first imagined his gift.

So with fantastic thoughts and perfect kisses, perfect but yet ineffably
vain because they expressed so little of what Michael would have had
them express, the hour passed.

"We must talk of practical things," he declared, rising from his knees.

"You always want to talk," Lily pouted.

"I want to marry you. Do you want to marry me?"

"Yes; but it's so difficult to do things quickly."

"We'll be married in a month. We'll be married on Saint Valentine's
Day," Michael announced.

"It's so wet now to think of weddings." She looked peevishly out of the
window.

"You haven't got to think about it. You've got to do it."

"And it's s