“No!” said she, “I don’t think I can call you so.  You are too old.  It would not be respectful.”  She meant it half in joke, and had no idea he would take the allusion to his age so seriously as he did.  He rose up, and coldly, as a matter of form, in a changed voice, wished her “Good-bye.”  Her heart sank; yet the old pride was there.  But as he was at the very door, some sudden impulse made her speak—­

“I have not vexed you, have I, Walter?”

He turned round, glowing with a thrill of delight.  She was as red as any rose; her looks dropped down to the ground.

They were not raised, when, half-an-hour afterwards, she said, “You won’t forbid my going to see Ruth, will you? because if you do, I give you notice I shall disobey you.”  The arm around her waist clasped her yet more fondly at the idea, suggested by this speech, of the control which he should have a right to exercise over her actions at some future day.

“Tell me,” said he, “how much of your goodness to me, this last happy hour, has been owing to the desire of having more freedom as a wife than as a daughter?” She was almost glad that he should think she needed any additional motive to her love for him before she could have accepted him.  She was afraid that she had betrayed the deep, passionate regard with which she had long looked upon him.  She was lost in delight at her own happiness.  She was silent for a time.  At length she said—­

“I don’t think you know how faithful I have been to you ever since the days when you first brought me pistachio-candy from London—­when I was quite a little girl.”

“Not more faithful than I have been to you,” for in truth, the recollection of his love for Ruth had utterly faded away, and he thought himself a model of constancy; “and you have tried me pretty well.  What a vixen you have been!” Jemima sighed; smitten with the consciousness of how little she had deserved her present happiness; humble with the recollection of the evil thoughts that had raged in her heart during the time (which she remembered well, though he may have forgotten it) when Ruth had had the affection which her jealous rival coveted.

“I may speak to your father; may not I, Jemima?”

No! for some reason or fancy which she could not define, and could not be persuaded out of, she wished to keep their mutual understanding a secret.  She had a natural desire to avoid the congratulations she expected from her family.  She dreaded her father’s consideration of the whole affair as a satisfactory disposal of his daughter to a worthy man, who, being his partner, would not require any abstraction of capital from the concern, and Richard’s more noisy delight at his sister’s having “hooked” so good a match.  It was only her simple-hearted mother that she longed to tell.  She knew that her mother’s congratulations would not jar upon her, though they might not sound the full organ-peal of her love.  But all that her mother knew passed