entrated her attention upon Mercy knocking at the
Wicket Gate. I felt awfully mean as regarded Edward; but what could I
do? I was in Gaza, gagged and bound; the Philistines hemmed me in.

The same evening the storm burst, the bolt fell, and--to continue the
metaphor--the atmosphere grew serene and clear once more. The evening
service was shorter than usual, the vicar, as he ascended the pulpit
steps, having dropped two pages out of his sermon-case,--unperceived by
any but ourselves, either at the moment or subsequently when the hiatus
was reached; so as we joyfully shuffled out I whispered Edward that
by racing home at top speed we should make time to assume our bows and
arrows (laid aside for the day) and play at Indians and buffaloes with
Aunt Eliza's fowls--already strolling roostwards, regardless of their
doom--before that sedately stepping lady could return. Edward hung at
the door, wavering; the suggestion had unhallowed charms.

At that moment Sabina issued primly forth, and, seeing Edward, put out
her tongue at him in the most exasperating manner conceivable; then
passed on her way, her shoulders rigid, her dainty head held high. A
man can stand very much in the cause of love: poverty, aunts, rivals,
barriers of every sort,--all these only serve to fan the flame. But
personal ridicule is a shaft that reaches the very vitals. Edward led
the race home at a speed which one of Ballantyne's heroes might have
equalled but never surpassed; and that evening the Indians dispersed
Aunt Eliza's fowls over several square miles of country, so that
the tale of them remaineth incomplete unto this day. Edward himself,
cheering wildly, pursued the big Cochin-China cock till the bird sank
gasping under the drawing-room window, whereat its mistress stood
petrified; and after supper, in the shrubbery, smoked a half-consumed
cigar he had picked up in the road, and declared to an awe-stricken
audience his final, his immitigable, resolve to go into the army.

The crisis was past, and Edward was saved!... And yet... sunt lachrymae
rerem... to me watching the cigar-stump alternately pale and glow
against the dark background of laurel, a vision of a tip-tilted nose,
of a small head poised scornfully, seemed to hover on the gathering
gloom--seemed to grow and fade and grow again, like the grin of the
Cheshire cat--pathetically, reproachfully even; and the charms of the
baker's wife slipped from my memory like snow-wreaths in thaw. After