There was nothing very romantic about it.  From the moment when Johanna entered the parlor, found them standing hand-in-hand at the fireside, and Hilary came forward and kissed her, and after a slight hesitation Robert did the same, the affair proceeded in most millpond fashion: 

        “Unruffled by those cataracts and breaks,
        That humor interposed too often makes.’: 

There were no lovers’ quarrels; Robert Lyon had chosen that best blessing next to a good woman, a sweet tempered woman; and there was no reason why they should quarrel more as lovers than they had done as friends.  And, let it be said to the eternal honor of both, now, no more than in their friendship days, was there any of that hungry engrossment of each other’s society, which is only another form of selfishness, and by which lovers so often make their own happy courting time a season of never-to-be-forgotten bitterness to every body connected with them.

Johanna suffered a little:  all people do when the new rights clash with the old ones; but she rarely betrayed it.  She was exceedingly good:  she saw her child happy, and she loved Robert Lyon dearly.  He was very mindful of her, very tender; and as Hilary still persisted in doing her daily duty in the shop, he spent more of his time with the elder sister than he did with the younger, and sometimes declared solemnly that if Hilary did not treat him well he intended to make an offer to Johanna!

Oh, the innumerable little jokes of those happy days!  Oh, the long, quiet walks by the river side, through the park, across Ham Common—­any where—­it did not matter; the whole world looked lovely, even on the dullest winter day!  Oh, the endless talks; the renewed mingling of two lives, which, though divided, had never been really apart, for neither had any thing to conceal; neither had ever loved any but the other.

Robert Lyon was, as I have said, a good deal changed, outwardly and inwardly.  He had mixed much in society, taken an excellent position therein, and this had given him not only a more polished manner, but an air of decision and command, as of one used to be obeyed.  There could not be the slightest doubt, as Johanna once laughingly told him, that he would always be “master in his own house.”

But he was very gentle with his “little woman” as he called her.  He would sit for hours at the “ingle-neuk”—­how he did luxuriate in the English fires!—­with Hilary on a footstool beside him, her arm resting on his knee, or her hand fast clasped in his.  And sometimes, when Johanna went out of the room, he would stoop and gather her close to his heart.  But I shall tell no tales; the world has no business with these sort of things.

Hilary was very shy of parading her happiness; she disliked any demonstrations thereof, even before Johanna.  And when Miss Balquidder, who had, of course, been told of the engagement, came down one day expressly to see her “fortunate fellow countryman,” this Machiavellian little woman actually persuaded her lover to have an important engagement in London!  She could not bear him to be “looked at.”