“But I won’t take anything,” said Overtop, no longer nettled, but charmed to perceive this exhibition of sound good sense in a young lady.

“But I insist that you shall,” continued Miss Pillbody, pleasantly.  “Tell me, now, how much it is.”

Overtop was standing within two feet of the schoolmistress, and her soft, dim eyes were beaming right into his.  We leave psychologists to settle the phenomenon as they will; but the fact was, that each saw love in the eyes of the other.  Overtop, in his bachelor musings, had thought over a hundred odd methods of putting the question.  At this critical moment in the history of two hearts, a new form of the proposition occurred to him, so original and eccentric, that he determined to propound it at once.

He took Miss Pillbody’s hand in his, before she knew it.  She blushed, and would have withdrawn it; but he retained the hand with a gentle pressure.

“My dear Miss Pillbody,” said Overtop, “I will take five dollars from you on one condition, and no other.  Will you grant it?”

The schoolmistress, not knowing what she was saying, said “Yes.”

“The condition is, that I shall buy an engagement ring, and put it on this dear hand.”

Miss Pillbody blushed, and cast down her gentle eyes.  The sagacious young lawyer, interpreting these signs as a full consent, stole his arm around her waist, and sealed the contract in a way all unknown to Chitty.

CHAPTER V.

A RETURNED CALIFORNIAN.

At last, Matthew Maltboy was engaged.  He had, since twenty, been dallying on the edge of a betrothal.  Now he had taken the momentous step into that anomalous region which lies between celibacy and married life, where a man is not exactly a bachelor, nor yet, by any means, a husband.  It is the land in which the dim enchantments of romance begin to assume the plain outlines of reality.  It is the land in which the pledge of undying affection, breathed, at some rapturous moment, into a delicate, inclining ear, becomes invested with awful meaning, and has a value in the legal market like a bond and mortgage.  It is the land where the excitement of pursuit is over, and the game is securely cornered, but not yet in hand.  It is the spot where the ardent huntsman of Love pauses to look back, and ceases to bend his longing gaze into the distance beyond.

How it came to pass that the unreliable Matthew Maltboy had become the affianced one of the pleasant widow Frump, it is not the purpose of this history to record.  Let it suffice to say, that the mutual aversion which they felt, some months before, at Mr. Whedell’s house, on New Year’s day, was the starting point in their course of true love.  Such an aversion, subsequently smoothed away, is often the most promising beginning of a courtship.