an affection slowly formed, rationally based while seeming preposterous, tending to bluntly funny utterances on both sides.  The girl was a creature of the enthusiasms, and had lifted that passion of her constitution into higher than the worship of sheer physical bravery.  She had pitied Mr. Gower Woodseer for his apparently extreme, albeit reverential, devotion to her mistress.  The plainly worded terms of his asking a young woman of her position and her reputation to marry him came on her like an intrusion of dazzling day upon the closed eyelids of the night, requiring time, and her mistress’s consent, and his father’s expressed approval, before she could yield him an answer that might appear a forgetfulness of her station, her ignorance, her damaged character.  Gower protested himself, with truth, a spotted pard, an ignoramus, and an outcast of all established classes, as the worshipper of Nature cannot well avoid being.

‘But what is it you like me for, Mr. Gower?’ Madge longed to know, that she might see a way in the strange land where he had planted her after a whirl; and he replied:  ’I ’ve thought of you till I can say I love you because you have naturally everything I shoot at.’

The vastness of the compliment drove her to think herself empty of anything.

He named courage, and its offspring, honesty, and devotedness, constancy.  Her bosom rose at the word.

‘Yes, constancy,’ he repeated; and ’growing girls have to “turn corners,” as you told me once.’

‘I did?’ said she, reddening under a memory, and abashed by his recollection of a moment she knew to have been weak with her, or noisy of herself.

Madge went straightway to her mistress and related her great event, in the tone of a confession of crime.  Her mistress’s approbation was timidly suggested rather than besought.

It came on a flood.  Carinthia’s eyes filled; she exclaimed:  ’Oh, that good man!—­he chooses my Madge for wife.  She said it, Rebecca said it.  Mrs. Wythan saw and said Mr. Woodseer loved my Madge.  I hear her saying it.  Then yes, and yes, from me for both your sakes, dear girl.  He will have the faithfullest, he will have the kindest—­Oh! and I shall know there can be a happy marriage in England.’

She summoned Gower; she clasped his hand, to thank him for appreciating her servant and sister, and for the happiness she had in hearing it; and she gazed at him and the laden brows of her Madge alternately, encouraging him to repeat his recital of his pecuniary means, for the poetry of the fact it verified, feasting on the sketch of a four-roomed cottage and an agricultural labourer’s widow for cook and housemaid; Madge to listen to his compositions of the day in the evening; Madge to praise him, Madge to correct his vanity.

Love was out of the count, but Carinthia’s leaping sympathy decorated the baldness of the sketch and spied his features through the daubed mask he chose to wear as a member of the order of husbands, without taking it for his fun.  Dry material statements presented the reality she doated to think of.  Moreover, the marriage of these two renewed her belief in true marriages, and their intention to unite was evidence of love.