Nelly was at least five years my senior.  But what of that?  Adam is the only man I ever heard of who didn’t in early youth fall in love with a woman older than himself, and I am convinced that he would have done so if he had had the opportunity.

I wonder if girls from fifteen to twenty are aware of the glamour they cast over the straggling, awkward boys whom they regard and treat as mere children?  I wonder, now.  Young women are so keen in such matters.  I wonder if Miss Nelly Glentworth never suspected until the very last night of her visit at Rivermouth that I was over ears in love with her pretty self, and was suffering pangs as poignant as if I had been ten feet high and as old as Methuselah?  For, indeed, I was miserable throughout all those five weeks.  I went down in the Latin class at the rate of three boys a day.  Her fresh young eyes came between me and my book, and there was an end of Virgil.

     “O love, love, love! 
     Love is like a dizziness,
     It winna let a body
     Gang aboot his business.”

I was wretched away from her, and only less wretched in her presence.  The special cause of my woe was this:  I was simply a little boy to Miss Glentworth.  I knew it.  I bewailed it.  I ground my teeth and wept in secret over the fact.  If I had been aught else in her eyes would she have smoothed my hair so carelessly, sending an electric shock through my whole system?  Would she have walked with me, hand in hand, for hours in the old garden, and once when I lay on the sofa, my head aching with love and mortification, would she have stooped down and kissed me if I hadn’t been a little boy?  How I despised little boys!  How I hated one particular little boy—­too little to be loved!

I smile over this very grimly even now.  My sorrow was genuine and bitter.  It is a great mistake on the part of elderly people, male and female, to tell a child that he is seeing his happiest days.  Don’t you believe a word of it, my little friend.  The burdens of childhood are as hard to bear as the crosses that weigh us down later in life, while the happinesses of childhood are tame compared with those of our maturer years.  And even if this were not so, it is rank cruelty to throw shadows over the young heart by croaking, “Be merry, for to-morrow you die!”

As the last days of Nelly’s visit drew near, I fell into a very unhealthy state of mind.  To have her so frank and unconsciously coquettish with me was a daily torment; to be looked upon and treated as a child was bitter almonds; but the thought of losing her altogether was distraction.

The summer was at an end.  The days were perceptibly shorter, and now and then came an evening when it was chilly enough to have a wood-fire in our sitting-room.  The leaves were beginning to take hectic tints, and the wind was practising the minor pathetic notes of its autumnal dirge.  Nature and myself appeared to be approaching our dissolution simultaneously—­