hardly be more than a repetition of the same words.  ’If now you are ready for me, then Lily, am I, as ever, still ready for you.’  And then, ‘if now’ again and again, ’if now;—­and still ‘if now’.  When his hair should be grey, and the wrinkles on his cheeks—­ay, though they should be on hers, he would still continue to tell her from year to year that he was ready to take her.  Surely some day that ‘if now’ would prevail.  And should it never prevail, the merit of his constancy should be its own reward.

Such letters as those she would surely keep.  Then he looked forward, down into the valley of coming years, and fancied her as she might sit reading them in the twilight of some long evening—­letters which had been written all in vain.  He thought that he could look forward with some satisfaction towards the close of his own career, in having been the hero of such a love-story.  At any rate, if such a story were to be his story, the melancholy attached to it should arise from no fault of his own.  He would still press her to be his wife.  And then as he remembered that he was only twenty-seven and that she was twenty-four, he began to marvel at the feeling of grey old age which had come upon him, and tried to make himself believe that he would have her yet before the bloom was off her cheeks.

He went into the cottage and made his way at once into the room in which Lady Julia was sitting.  She did not speak at first, but looked anxiously about his face.  And he did not speak, but turned to a table near the window and took up a book—­though the room was too dark for him to see to read the words.  ‘John,’ at last said Lady Julia.

‘Well, my lady?’

‘Have you nothing to tell me, John?’

’Nothing on earth—­except the same old story, which has now become a matter of course.’

‘But, John, will you not tell me what she said?’

’Lady Julia, she has said no; simply no.  It is a very easy word to say, and she has said it so often that it seems to come from her quite naturally.’  Then he got a candle and sat down over the fire with a volume of a novel.  It was not yet past five, and Lady Julia did not go upstairs to dress till six, and therefore there was an hour during which they were together.  John had at first been rather grand to his old friend, and very uncommunicative.  But before the dressing-bell had rung he had been coaxed into a confidential strain and had told everything.  ‘I suppose it is wrong and selfish,’ he said.  ’I suppose I am a dog in a manger.  But I do own that there is a consolation to me in the assurance that she will never be the wife of that scoundrel.’

‘I could never forgive her if she were to marry him now,’ said Lady Julia.

’I could never forgive him.  But she has said that she will not, and I know that she will not forswear herself.  I shall go on with it, Lady Julia.  I have made up my mind to that.  I suppose it will never come to anything, but I shall stick to it.  I can live an old bachelor as well as another man.  At any rate I shall stick to it.’  Then the good silly old woman comforted him and applauded him as though he were a hero among men, and did reward him, as Lily had predicted, by one of those now rare bottles of super-excellent port which had come to her from her brother’s cellar.