aid I. "You are wearing a red
feather in your bonnet. Miss La Force is dressed in something dark.
There is a young man there. He is rude enough to address your daughter
as Winnie before he has ever been----"

"Oh, mother," she cried, "of course it is he! The face haunted me, and I
could not think where we had met it."

Well, there are some things that we don't talk about to another man,
even when we know each other as well as I know you. Why should we, when
that which is most engrossing to us consists in those gradual shades of
advance from friendship to intimacy, and from intimacy to something
more sacred still, which can scarcely be written at all, far less made
interesting to another? The time came at last when they were to leave
Birchespool, and my mother and I went round the night before to say
goodbye. Winnie and I were thrown together for an instant.

"When will you come back to Birchespool?" I asked.

"Mother does not know."

"Will you come soon, and be my wife?"

I had been turning over in my head all the evening how prettily I could
lead up to it, and how neatly I could say it--and behold the melancholy
result! Well, perhaps the feeling of my heart managed to make itself
clear even through those bald words. There was but one to judge, and she
was of that opinion.

I was so lost in my own thoughts that I walked as far as Oakley Villa
with my mother before I opened my mouth. "Mam," said I at last, "I have
proposed to Winnie La Force, and she has accepted me."

"My boy," said she, "you are a true Packenham." And so I knew that my
mother's approval had reached the point of enthusiasm. It was not for
days--not until I expressed a preference for dust under the bookcase
with quiet, against purity and ructions--that the dear old lady
perceived traces of the Munros.

The time originally fixed for the wedding was six months after this; but
we gradually whittled it down to five and to four. My income had risen
to about two hundred and seventy pounds at the time; and Winnie had
agreed, with a somewhat enigmatical smile, that we could manage very
well on that--the more so as marriage sends a doctor's income up. The
reason of her smile became more apparent when a few weeks before that
date I received a most portentous blue document in which "We, Brown
& Woodhouse, the solicitors for the herein and hereafter mentioned
Winifred La Force, do hereby"--state a surprising number of things,
and use some remarkably bad