This way was into Fernydell, and Mary answered, ’Oh, no—­no; it is where I most wanted to go with you.  We have never been there together since—­’

‘No, you never would walk with me after I could go alone!’ said Louis, with a playful tone of reproach, veiling deep feeling.

In silence he handed her down the rocky steps, plunging deeper among the hazels and rowan-trees; then pausing, he turned aside the luxuriant leaves of a tuft of hartstongue, and showed her, cut on a stone, veiled both by the verdure and the form of the rock, the letters—­

Deo Gratias,
L. F. 1847.

‘I like that!’ was all that Mary’s full heart allowed her to say.

‘Yes,’ said Louis, ’I feel quite as thankful for the accident as for the preservation.’

‘And that dear mamma was with us,’ added Mary.  ’Between her and you, it was a blessing to us all.  I see these letters are not new; you must have cut them out long ago.’

‘As soon as I could get here without help,’ he answered.  ’I thought I should be able to find the very spot where I lay, by remembering the cross which the bare mountain-ash boughs made against the sky; but by that time they were all leaf and flower; and now, do you see, there they are, with the fruit just formed and blushing.’

‘Like other things,’ said Mary, reaching after the spray, ’once all blossom, now—­’

‘Fruit very unripe,’ as he said, between a smile and a sigh; ’but there is some encouragement in the world after all, and every project of mine has not turned out like my two specimens of copper ore.  You remember them, Mary and our first encounter?’

‘Remember it!’ said Mary.  ’I don’t think I forgot a day of that summer.’

‘What I brought you here for,’ said Louis, ’was to ask you to let me do what I have long wished—­to let me put the letter M here?’

‘I think you might have done it without leave,’ said Mary.

’So I might at first, but by the time I came here again, Mary, you had become in my estimation ‘a little more than kin,’ and less than-no, I wont say that, but one could not treat you as comfortably as Clara.  I lost a cousin one August day, and never found her again!’

‘Never?’

’Never—­but the odd thing is, that I cannot believe that what I did find has been away these seven years.’

‘Yes, that is very strange,’ said Mary; ’I have felt it so.  Wo do seem to understand and guess each other’s thoughts as if we had been going on together all this time.  I believe it is because you gave me the first impulse to think, and taught me the way.’

‘And I know who first taught me to think to any purpose,’ said Louis, smiling.  ‘But who is this descending on us?’

It was the Spanish gentleman, reddening all over at such an encounter, in mid-career towards her at the Terrace, and muttering something, breathless and almost surly, about begging pardon.