ured me, with a most
winning smile, that he should feel constrained to rise in church and
forbid the banns unless I promised to adopt him as a brother."

Randolph's eyes and mouth opened again.

"Perhaps you'd better adopt him as something still nearer!" he said,
with a pretense of anger.

"Now that you mention it," Constance replied in a confidential tone,
"I came very near doing so. The only reason I did not was that he
forgot to ask me."

Randolph broke into a laugh. Then he added in a puzzled tone:

"Well, it beats everything! In all the ten years I've known him I've
never heard him say as much as that!"

"I can't repeat all he said----" Constance began again.

"What!" Randolph cried with another semblance of jealousy.

"No, because it lay in his manner; that gentle, affectionate, yet
manly manner--indescribable! perfectly indescribable!"

"It's the same to everybody," said Randolph, "and everybody loves him.
I never knew another such fellow. It's past belief the way he wins
people. And he says nothing, too."

"Ah, but he does!" repeated Constance. "Well, well, there's no telling
it all. I continually think of the word delightful in recurring to it
and him. I assured him that he would be a member of our family, and
that our fireside and our crust--I really didn't dare to promise more
than a crust, you know, Randolph--would be his as well as ours. When
he left he said good-by in the same perfectly easy, natural way,
calling me Constance----"

"What?" Randolph exclaimed.

"And then he said, 'I am a brother now, you know,' and he bent and
kissed me."

"The dickens!" cried Randolph.

And Constance finished the sentence.

"He did. And really in the most delightful way," she added naively.

Shortly after this cementing of new bonds there was a quiet wedding
ceremony one morning at the little suburban church, and when this was
over Randolph and Constance were ready for their walk through life.

This walk--sometimes quickened into a jog trot and even into a lope,
sometimes slackened till it becomes a crawl--is variously diversified,
according to the temper and general disposition of the parties. In the
present instance there was reasonable hope of some harmony of gait,
but life is life, whether within or without the wedded fold, and
"human natur' is human natur';" and although David Harum may tell us
that some folks have more of this commodity than others, yet we know
that every one has a lump of it, a