Finally, as a sort of security against all suspicion, you cross it out,—­cross it a great many ways, even holding it up to the light to see that there should be no air of intention about it.

——­You need have no fear, Clarence, that your hieroglyphics will be studied so closely.  Accidental as they are, you are very much more interested in them than any one else.

——­It is a common fallacy of this dream in most stages of life, that a vast number of persons employ their time chiefly in spying out its operations.

Yet Madge cares nothing about you, that you know of.  Perhaps it is the very reason, though you do not suspect it then, why you care so much for her.  At any rate she is a friend of Nelly’s, and it is your duty not to dislike her.  Nelly too, sweet Nelly, gets an inkling of matters,—­for sisters are very shrewd in suspicions of this sort, shrewder than brothers or fathers,—­and, like the good, kind girl that she is, she wishes to humor even your weakness.

Madge drops in to tea quite often:  Nelly has something in particular to show her, two or three times a week.  Good Nelly! perhaps she is making your troubles all the greater.  You gather large bunches of grapes for Madge—­because she is a friend of Nelly’s—­which she doesn’t want at all, and very pretty bouquets, which she either drops or pulls to pieces.

In the presence of your father one day you drop some hint about Madge in a very careless way,—­a way shrewdly calculated to lay all suspicion,—­at which your father laughs.  This is odd; it makes you wonder if your father was ever in love himself.

You rather think that he has been.

Madge’s father is dead, and her mother is poor; and you sometimes dream how—­whatever your father may think or feel—­you will some day make a large fortune, in some very easy way, and build a snug cottage, and have one horse for your carriage and one for your wife, (not Madge, of course—­that is absurd,) and a turtleshell cat for your wife’s mother, and a pretty gate to the front yard, and plenty of shrubbery; and how your wife will come dancing down the path to meet you,—­as the Wife does in Mr. Irving’s “Sketch-Book,”—­and how she will have a harp in the parlor, and will wear white dresses with a blue sash.

——­Poor Clarence, it never occurs to you that even Madge may grow fat, and wear check aprons, and snuffy-brown dresses of woollen stuff, and twist her hair in yellow papers!  Oh, no, boyhood has no such dreams as that!

I shall leave you here in the middle of your first foray into the world of sentiment, with those wicked blue eyes chasing rainbows over your heart, and those little feet walking every day into your affections.  I shall leave you, before the affair has ripened into any overtures, and while there is only a sixpence split in halves, and tied about your neck and Maggie’s neck, to bind your destinies together.

If I even hinted at any probability of your marrying her, or of your not marrying her, you would be very likely to dispute me.  One knows his own feelings, or thinks he does, so much better than any one can tell him.