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 rerum_ . . . 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
all, Sabina was nowise to blame: why should the child be punished?
To-morrow I would give them the slip, and stroll round by her garden
promiscuous-like, at a time when the farmer was safe in the rickyard. If
nothing came of it, there was no harm done; and if on the