So the old desk became smart in brocade and gold-lace, the book received a cushion all bullion and embroidery, and the chairs emulated the splendor.  It required a poet or a girl in love to clothe a fancy so beautifully, and Nellie was both.  It was her shrine:  why should she not adorn it?

I cannot follow the process of thought in Danby’s mind as he looked at this and at Nellie—­Nellie blushing with the sudden guiltiness that even the discovery of a harmless action will bring when we wish to conceal it.  Sometimes a moment reveals much.

“Nellie”—­it was the first time he had called her so since his return—­“I must give you a reading-lesson:  come, sit here.”

Mechanically she obeyed him, all the rebel fading away:  she looked like the Nellie of other days.  She felt she had laid bare her soul, but in proportion as her confusion overcame her did he become decided.  It is the slaves that make tyrants, it is said.

Under the impulse of his hand the book opened at the well-worn page.

“Read!”

For a little while she sat with downcast eyes.  Well she knew the passage to which he was pointing:  “Love!  But it cannot be sounded:  my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the bay of Portugal.”

The sentence seemed to dance and grow till it covered the page—­grow till in her sight it assumed the size of a placard, and then it took life and became her accuser—­told in big letters the story of her devotion to the mocking boy beside her.

“There is good advice on the preceding page,” he whispered smiling.  “Orlando says he would kiss before he spoke:  may I?”

She started up and looked at his triumphant face a moment, her mouth quivering, her eyes full of tears.  “How can you—­” she began.

But before she could finish he was by her side:  “Because I love you—­love you, all that the book says, and a thousand times more.  Because if you love me we will live our own romance, and I doubt if we cannot make our old woods as romantic as the forest of Arden.  Will you not say,” he asked tenderly, “that there will be at least one pair of true lovers there?”

I could not hear Nellie’s answer:  her head was so near his—­on his shoulder, in fact—­that she whispered it in his ear.  But a moment after, pushing him from her with the old mischief sparkling from her eyes, she said, “’Til frown and be perverse, and say thee nay, so thou wilt woo,’” and looked a saucy challenge in his face.

“Naughty sprite!” he exclaimed, catching her in his arms and shutting her mouth with kisses.

It was not long after, perhaps a year, that a happy bride and groom might have been seen walking up the hemlock avenue arm in arm.

“Do you remember,” she asked, smiling thoughtfully—­“do you remember the time I begged you to come home with me and be my pet?”

The young husband leaned down and said something the narrator did not catch, but from the expression of his face it must have been very spoony:  with a bride such as that charming Nellie, how could he help it?