with shading or colouring.

'Yes. What a sweet innocent face it is! and yet so--Oh, dear!' He
sighed and got up, his hands in his pockets, to walk up and down the
room in evident disturbance of mind. He suddenly stopped opposite to me.

'You'll tell them how it all was. Be sure and tell the good minister
that I was so sorry not to wish him good-bye, and to thank him and his
wife for all their kindness. As for Phillis,--please God in two years
I'll be back and tell her myself all in my heart.'

'You love Phillis, then?' said I.

'Love her! Yes, that I do. Who could help it, seeing her as I have
done? Her character as unusual and rare as her beauty! God bless her!
God keep her in her high tranquillity, her pure innocence.--Two years!
It is a long time.--But she lives in such seclusion, almost like the
sleeping beauty, Paul,'--(he was smiling now, though a minute before I
had thought him on the verge of tears,)--'but I shall come back like a
prince from Canada, and waken her to my love. I can't help hoping that
it won't be difficult, eh, Paul?'

This touch of coxcombry displeased me a little, and I made no answer.
He went on, half apologetically,--

'You see, the salary they offer me is large; and beside that, this
experience will give me a name which will entitle me to expect a still
larger in any future undertaking.'

'That won't influence Phillis.'

'No! but it will make me more eligible in the eyes of her father and
mother.' I made no answer.

'You give me your best wishes, Paul,' said he, almost pleading. 'You
would like me for a cousin?'

I heard the scream and whistle of the engine ready down at the sheds.

'Ay, that I should,' I replied, suddenly softened towards my friend now
that he was going away. 'I wish you were to be married to-morrow, and I
were to be best man.'

'Thank you, lad. Now for this cursed portmanteau (how the minister
would be shocked); but it is heavy!' and off we sped into the darkness.
He only just caught the night train at Eltham, and I slept, desolately
enough, at my old lodgings at Miss Dawsons', for that night. Of course
the next few days I was busier than ever, doing both his work and my
own. Then came a letter from him, very short and affectionate. He was
going out in the Saturday steamer, as he had more than half expected;
and by the following Monday the man who was to succeed him would be
down at Eltham. There was a P.S., with only these words:--'My nosegay
goes with me t