Time had reconciled Isabella Lister to her brother’s choice, and she now deigned to smile upon the lovers, very much to Gilbert’s satisfaction.  He had been too proud to supplicate her good graces; but he was pleased that his only sister should show herself gracious and affectionate to the girl he loved so fondly.  During this second visit of his, therefore, Marian came very often to Lidford House; sometimes accompanied by her uncle, sometimes alone; and there was perfect harmony between the elder and younger lady.

The partridges upon Martin Lister’s estate did not suffer much damage from his brother-in-law’s gun that autumn.  Gilbert found it a great deal pleasanter to spend his mornings dawdling in the little cottage drawing-room or under the walnut-trees with Marian, than to waste his noontide hours in the endeavour to fill a creditable game-bag.  There is not very much to tell of the hours which those two spent together so happily.  It was an innocent, frivolous, useless employment of time, and left little trace behind it, except in the heart of one of those two.  Gilbert wondered at himself when, in some sober interval of reflection, he happened to consider those idle mornings, those tranquil uneventful afternoons and evenings, remembering what a devoted man of business he had once been, and how a few months ago he would have denounced such a life in another.

“Well,” he said to himself, with a happy laugh, “a man can take this fever but once in his life, and it is only wise in him to surrender himself utterly to the divine delirium.  I shall have no excuse for neglecting business by-and-by, when my little wife and I are settled down together for the rest of our days.  Let me be her lover while I may.  Can I ever be less than her lover, I wonder?  Will marriage, or custom, or the assurance that we belong to each other for the rest of our days, take the poetry out of our lives?  I think not; I think Marian must always be to me what she has seemed to me from the very first—­something better and brighter than the common things of this life.”

Custom, which made Marian Nowell dearer to Gilbert Fenton every day, had by this time familiarised her with his position as her future husband.  She was no longer surprised or distressed when he pleaded for a short engagement, and a speedy realization of that Utopian home which they were to inhabit together.  The knowledge of her uncle’s delight in this engagement of hers might have reconciled her to it, even if she had not loved Gilbert Fenton.  And she told herself that she did love him; or, more often putting the matter in the form of a question, asked herself whether she could be so basely ungrateful as not to love one who regarded her with such disinterested affection?