At the asseveration, “I can say honestly,” a sudden illumination came over her face, as if every cloud had been instantaneously swept away.

Persons conversant with such subjects maintain that the plain words, “I will,” are generally first used by the bride in church, when she promises to worship M. or N. with her body.  No doubt, Bertie was answered somehow; but as there are no reporters in Paradise, so happiness requires no chronicler, and we drop the curtain while Cecil becomes engaged to her ideal and only love—­a fate sufficiently uncommon in this world of contradictions.

The wind was lulled to a whisper, and a golden sunset was reddening the lake, ere our lovers remembered, with a start, that they had to get home.

“Now comes the rude awakening,” cried Du Meresq.  “Dinner spoiled, and a very stern expression of paternal opinion to you, my poor Cecil.  Very grumpy to me.  By Jove, I won’t tell him to-night!  Here’s your half-baked boots.  We shall never get them on.  Shall I carry you to the boat, and roll your feet in the bear-skin?”

“I feel as if a hundred years had passed since we were last in the canoe,” said Cecil, evading this obliging proposal.  “But how the lake has calmed itself down; it seems sleeping, and the shore and the islands cast long shadows on it.”

  “’Tis one of those ambrosial eves
   A day of storm so often leaves,”

began Bertie, with his incurable propensity for quoting.  “What made you so shy at the station, Cecil?  I was obliged to put you in a rage to get you natural again.”

“After the pleasing picture you draw of our domestic felicity, I can’t think how I ever accepted you.”

“I was just going to begin when I was unlacing your boots, but the idea struck me that to propose holding a lady’s foot instead of her hand, would be too ludicrous a variation from all precedent.  What a sensitive girl you are, Cecil!  I am sure you knew what was coming, for I felt you drawing into a shell of consciousness, that would have made me nervous too, if I had not been impertinent instead”

Cecil was not far from a relapse, for dreamily happy as she was, she had already begun to torment herself.  She had accepted Du Meresq so readily,—­good Heavens! she might almost say thankfully,—­and, disguise it as he might, he must know it.  Could a thing be really valued that was so easy of attainment?  When Cecil was shy she was usually dumb, it never revealed itself by hasty, foolish speech, or an artificial laugh.  Her countenance, however, was not so silent; and Bertie, as he watched her changing hues and varying expression, thought how much more he admired that mobile, sensitive face, than the pink and white of a soul-less beauty.

“Where is your hand, Cecil?” stretching out a long arm to feel for it.  “I am sure a dragon of propriety might trust a loving pair in this wabbly little craft, which an attempt at osculation would upset.”