“I cannot pretend to offer you a heart which has never known either love or disappointment.  I have loved already, and my heart was years in recovering from the grief I felt at seeing her become another’s.  That, however, is over, and having seen yourself I rejoice over a disappointment which I thought at one time would have been fatal to me.  It has left me a less ardent lover than I should perhaps otherwise have been, but it has increased tenfold my power of appreciating your many charms and my desire that you should become my wife.  Please let me have a few lines of answer by the bearer to let me know whether or not my suit is accepted.  If you accept me I will at once come and talk the matter over with Mr and Mrs Allaby, whom I shall hope one day to be allowed to call father and mother.

“I ought to warn you that in the event of your consenting to be my wife it may be years before our union can be consummated, for I cannot marry till a college living is offered me.  If, therefore, you see fit to reject me, I shall be grieved rather than surprised.—­Ever most devotedly yours,

   “THEOBALD PONTIFEX.”

And this was all that his public school and University education had been able to do for Theobald!  Nevertheless for his own part he thought his letter rather a good one, and congratulated himself in particular upon his cleverness in inventing the story of a previous attachment, behind which he intended to shelter himself if Christina should complain of any lack of fervour in his behaviour to her.

I need not give Christina’s answer, which of course was to accept.  Much as Theobald feared old Mr Allaby I do not think he would have wrought up his courage to the point of actually proposing but for the fact of the engagement being necessarily a long one, during which a dozen things might turn up to break it off.  However much he may have disapproved of long engagements for other people, I doubt whether he had any particular objection to them in his own case.  A pair of lovers are like sunset and sunrise:  there are such things every day but we very seldom see them.  Theobald posed as the most ardent lover imaginable, but, to use the vulgarism for the moment in fashion, it was all “side.”  Christina was in love, as indeed she had been twenty times already.  But then Christina was impressionable and could not even hear the name “Missolonghi” mentioned without bursting into tears.  When Theobald accidentally left his sermon case behind him one Sunday, she slept with it in her bosom and was forlorn when she had as it were to disgorge it on the following Sunday; but I do not think Theobald ever took so much as an old toothbrush of Christina’s to bed with him.  Why, I knew a young man once who got hold of his mistress’s skates and slept with them for a fortnight and cried when he had to give them up.